Snowstorm of Our Past novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Upstairs at the Spur

Mallory and her grandmother throw Clint out and she signs the divorce petition from her bed, then goes back to the post house for her things and finds Amber inside rocking his son in Mallory's grandfather's chair.

I sat up in the bed.

Everything below my waist hurt, but I sat up.

"Put whatever you want in my chart," I said. "Then put this in it too."

The nurse looked from him to me.

"Three weeks ago he told me he was going on a training exercise," I said. "Today I found him at the post hospital with another woman and the son he had with her. That's why I drove into a blizzard."

Clint's jaw went tight.

"Mal, not in front of people."

"You brought the people. You started this in front of them."

Tilly stirred in the bassinet and made a small noise.

Clint's face changed. He took a step toward her.

"Don't," I said.

"She's my daughter."

"You've known about her for eight months. You knew about him for nine. Don't."

He stopped.

The nurse cleared her throat.

"Sir, the patient has asked you not to approach. I'll need you to step out."

"I'm her husband."

"Not for long," said a voice from the hall.

My grandmother walked in shaking snow off her red knit hat.

She is seventy-six years old and five foot one.

She was still wearing her diner apron under her parka.

She looked at Clint.

"You," she said. "Out."

"Gran, I just want to see my..."

"You don't get to call me that." She pointed at the door. "Out, before I call the sheriff, and he's eaten free pie at my counter for thirty years."

Clint looked at me.

I looked back at him and didn't say anything.

He left.

Gran pulled the chair up to the bassinet and sat down slowly.

Then she looked in at Tilly for a long time.

"Well," she said finally, and her voice cracked. "Isn't she a little biscuit."

I started crying again.

She held my hand until I stopped.

At nine the next morning, a lawyer came to my room.

She'd eaten breakfast at the Spur every Saturday since I was in grade school.

She sat on the end of my bed with a folder and a pen.

"You're sure," she said. "Colorado doesn't make you prove anything. You just say it's broken."

"It's broken."

"Then sign here."

I signed my name, Mallory Brooks, in big, steady letters.

She asked about custody, and I told her what he'd said at three in the morning.

"Then we get ahead of him," she said. "Write down everything. Dates. What he told you about the exercise. What you saw at the hospital."

"I can do that."

"And Mallory? Get your things out of that house before he decides they're his."

They discharged us on Sunday.

Gran's apartment over the Silver Spur has two bedrooms, a slanting floor and a radiator that bangs.

I grew up in the little back room.

Gran had already put a borrowed crib in the corner and my old quilt on the bed.

By noon, the team was coming up the back stairs.

The schoolteacher brought a casserole and a stack of tiny knit hats.

The dog handler brought a box of diapers and stood awkwardly holding it.

The kid brought a stuffed moose bigger than Tilly.

"I panicked at the gas station," he said.

"It's perfect," I told him.

Gabe came last.

He had a car seat box under one arm and the dog at his heels.

"The hospital wouldn't let you leave without one," he said. "Somebody had to buy it."

"You didn't have to do that."

"I know." He set it down. "I also put it together already and took it apart again so you could see it's easy."

The dog went straight to the crib and lay down beside it like he'd been assigned.

"He thinks she's his," Gabe said.

"He can have her when she's teething."

Gran fed everyone.

The schoolteacher held Tilly. The kid was too scared to and then wouldn't give her back.

I sat on the couch with a heating pad on my back and watched people I'd known my whole life eat stew in my grandmother's kitchen.

Nobody asked about Clint.

Late in the afternoon, I said, "I need my stuff from the house on post."

The room got quiet.

"I'll drive," Gabe said. "I've got the big truck."

"I'll come," said the dog handler.

"Me too," said the kid.

Gran folded her dish towel.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Mallory doesn't lift a thing. You boys lift. I'll watch the baby."

We left at seven the next morning.

My lawyer had called the battalion and been told Major Keller would be on duty all day.

Fort Carson was gray and flat under old snow.

Our house was the last one on the row, the one with the red door I'd painted myself.

The porch light was on.

There was a white SUV in my driveway.

"Is he home?" Gabe asked.

"That's not his car."

I went up the steps.

My key still worked.

The house smelled like coffee and baby lotion.

Somebody was humming in the nursery.

I walked down the hall and stopped in the doorway.

My grandfather built that oak rocking chair for my grandmother when she was pregnant with my mother.

I'd carried it up from Leadville in the back of my car when I moved here.

Amber Dwyer was sitting in it.

She had Clint's son at her breast and her bare feet up on my footstool.

She looked up at me and smiled.

"Oh," she said. "Clint said you might come by."

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