April & Oliver by Tess Callahan Page A

and kisses her cheek. The abrasion of his skin against hers gives her a start, the prickly stubble, the warmth
     of his lips. He smells faintly of dinner wine and his brother’s cigarettes. She brings her knees to her chest and folds her
     arms around them.
    “Why don’t you take your old room,” she says. “I’ll be fine here on the sofa.”
    He waves a hand and settles back. “It was ridiculous here tonight,” he says. “All of us putting on a show for Nana.”
    “Thank God my parents aren’t here. They would never have gotten through it.”
    “And you?”
    She sighs. “Buddy’s mail gets forwarded to me. You’d be amazed how many bills a dead person can get. I pay them and throw
     out the catalogs.” An ember falls from the log, glows, and vanishes. “There’s a girl in Kingston who thinks she’s in love
     with him. She doesn’t understand why he won’t answer her letters.”
    “How awful.”
    “So last night I wrote her a love letter and signed his name. I plan to send it along with his obituary, explaining that I
     just came across the unmailed letter in his knapsack. What do you think?”
    “You’re kidding, right?”
    “Why?”
    “It’s cruel.”
    “I thought the opposite.”
    “What if they hardly knew each other?”
    “She’s crazy about him.”
    “It’s a lie, April. What if you got some detail wrong? What if he wrote to her before, and she sees the handwriting is different?”
    “She’ll believe because she’ll want to.”
    “You’re playing with someone’s deepest emotions.”
    “Am I?” She looks at him.
    He turns toward the window.
    “Would it be better to tell her that there’s no record of his feelings, and that for most of the time she’s been in love with
     him, he’s been dead?”
    “It’s honest.”
    “Sometimes you have to think about the purpose of
honest
.”
    “No you don’t.”
    “I’m going to mail it.”
    “Do what you like.”
    “I think Buddy would want me to.”
    “I can’t argue with that.”
    They fall into silence.
    “How are you?” he says finally. “I mean, really.”
    A few glib answers pass through her mind; she lets them go. “Well, I got myself here tonight,” she says. “Snow and all.”
    He nods appreciatively, glancing toward the window. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
    “It never snows on Christmas,” she says. “Sleet, hail, freezing rain, okay. But this? It’s a goddamn Hallmark card out there.”
    “No,” he says. “A card could never capture this. Nothing could.”
    “Nothing?” she says. “Winslow Homer? Robert Frost?”
    He smiles. “You just like disagreeing with me.”
    “George Winston’s
Winter,
” she says. “Don’t tell me he didn’t capture snow.”
    “Snow, yes. But
this
snow, here and now?” He turns to look at her. His eyes look different in this light, not the usual crystalline blue, but
     a deep, smoky indigo. Her face warms.
    “What do you think it means?” she asks, nodding toward the window.
    “The snow?” He tilts his head curiously. “It means itself.”
    “Don’t go getting all Zen on me.” She elbows him. “I’m a girl who needs answers.” She realizes immediately that it was a mistake
     to touch him. He hasn’t moved, yet he feels much closer now.
    “Answers, eh? So, what’s the question?”
    She looks back toward the window.
The question.
She is still staring at the snow when she feels Oliver lift her hair out from behind the tie. She shudders, surprised by his
     touch. He begins to braid her hair, the way he used to when they were children.
    April closes her eyes. For a moment she allows herself to feel his closeness. Her scalp tingles. Grains of ice beat upon the
     windowpane. Oliver’s breath moves in and out of his lungs. She feels it on her neck. She is in a trance. She tells herself
     not to move and then to move quickly to break the spell.
    “How’s Bernadette?”
    “At her parents’,” he says, but that wasn’t what she asked.
    “Have you set a