Chapter 4: Cold Feet

"That's mine," I said, when Garnet laid the hat on my wet clothes.

"I know," he said. "It's yours."

He didn't ask what it was.

He nodded at Taras, who was getting a glass of water with the dish towel still in his other hand, and went out of the kitchen.

I stood there in Abram's jacket with the duffel against my hip.

Nobody had ever handled that hat without a question, and my throat closed on how much I wanted to thank him.

I carried the bag down to the basement instead, because the washer was there.

The stairs were steep and bare, and the cold came up them from the concrete.

At the bottom stood a church pew.

It was real oak, ten feet long, with a hymn rack still screwed to the back, and it faced the washer and dryer across the floor.

Somebody had stuck a strip of hockey tape on it and written SIN BIN across it in black marker.

I loaded the washer with the dumpster clothes and shut the lid.

The concrete floor was freezing, and I stood on it in my wool socks and realized I couldn't feel my toes.

I had walked from the truck to the porch in wet boots, in thirty-four below, and I hadn't thought about it.

I sat down on the pew and pulled my socks off.

My feet were white at the tips, and they stung when I touched them.

"Don't rub them."

Garnet was on the stairs, with a mug in his good hand and a wool blanket over his arm.

He came down and set the mug on the pew.

It was tea with honey, and it steamed in the cold.

"Frostnip," he said. "Rubbing makes it worse."

He sat down at the other end of the pew, and he looked at my feet and not at me.

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