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brandy. For a man who didn’t drink in public, he certainly made up for it at home. The moment the bottle was empty, he’d grabbed her and kissed her. And then he’d passed out on the couch.
    Furious, Ellen had grabbed her coat and walked the ten blocks to her own apartment, practically freezing in the skirt she’d worn to please him. Rob Applegate was a terrible stick-in-the-mud and a hypocrite to boot. He’d even had the nerve to come up to her after church the next morning to ask whether she’d had a good time.
    As she headed down the hallway, Ellen caught sight of her reflection in the mirrored door of the multipurpose room. Wearing a new red pantsuit she’d ordered from the Penney’s extra-tall catalog, she thought she looked much better than usual. Skirts always hung awkwardly on her boyish hips, and if she tucked her blouses in, only a padded brassiere gave her any bustline at all. This pantsuit’s tunic masked her figure and her legs felt warm for the first time this winter.
    Heading on down the corridor, Ellen frowned at the grimy handprints on the walls. They could do with a good scrubbing or even better, a bright, cheerful paint job. Everything outside was black-and-white, glaring white sheets of snow dotted with the bare black skeletons of trees. Children needed color in their lives and the school was decorated in dirty beige and anemic green. Red and blue stripes would be nice, or even a bright cheerful yellow. Billy Zabinski might be less of a problem if school offered a nice bright environment.
    A bad draft whistled under the big glass doors that led to the playground, and Ellen shivered. The snow was blowing so hard she could barely see the pine trees at the far edge of the playground. If visibility grew severely limited, as predicted in the weather report, the buses might come early to take the children home. And if the wind kept on blowing through the night, they might just have a school closure in the morning. It would be nice to have a snow day, but in Minnesota the plows hit the roads the moment the snow started to fall and stayed out until it stopped. The whole system was very efficient. They’d had years to perfect it.
    Ellen sighed. Three and a half hours to go. Tomorrow would be more of the same, and next week, and next month. This was her fourth year at Garfield Elementary and it already seemed like a lifetime.
    Ellen loved the first two months of winter with its sparkling blanket of white snow. But when the mercury consistently dipped down below zero and every day tested her survival skills, she began to long for the spring that was still at least another four months away. By the end of January, she was sick to death of climbing into a parka and boots and heavy mittens just to empty the garbage, and of remembering to plug in the headbolt heater on her car every night so it would start in the morning.
    Her first October in Minnesota, Ellen had taken the advice of her coworkers and gathered all the necessary survival gear. In addition to the ice scraper and snow brush she carried next to her on the passenger seat, there was a twenty-pound sack of kitty litter in her trunk to add ballast so she wouldn’t get stuck in a snowdrift. There was also an empty three-pound coffee can containing a candle and a book of matches to provide life-sustaining heat and light in case her car broke down. And she’d put together a cache of candy bars and bottled water that lay frozen in a shopping bag in her trunk. An extra gallon of gasoline sloshed in its plastic container, along with a can of Instant Flat-Fix that probably wouldn’t even work in subzero temperatures. Ready for the long Minnesota winter, she hated every moment of it.
    Ellen stared out at the slide, a snow-covered hump that rose like a prehistoric beast out of a field of unbroken white, and wondered what would happen if she just pushed open the doors, ran across the playground, climbed into her car, and