Read In Winter's Grip for Free Online Page A

programmed heating cycle, and I heard the furnace kick in. I’d hardly noticed how cool it was until that moment. I heard the clock ticking loudly on the wall over the stove, the same clock that my mother had picked out of the Sears catalogue thirty years before. The room smelled stale, the dankness heightened by a mixture of cooking grease, overripe bananas and rotting potatoes, and I suddenly couldn’t wait to leave it. I went quickly down the darkened hallway into the living room. Here Dad had splurged on a new couch and leather recliners that encircled a big screen television. He’d acquired a state of the art sound system too that had place of honor on top of a shelving unit. The ornaments and pictures Mom had collected were gone, but lower down on the shelving unit, my father had placed a framed picture of himself and two buddies dressed in hunting gear and holding rifles. In the photo, Dad was grasping a handful of dead ducks by their feet and grinning into the camera.
    I walked over and picked up the frame, staring into Dad’s face and trying to see any part of him that I could latch onto. I had no idea why I thought the essence of him would be captured in a photo when I’d never been able to find it in real life. He looked fit and ruddy-faced, as if time had held off aging him. His blonde hair had turned a soft white, cut in a layered style, and his eyes were still a deep vivid blue. I put his picture back next to framed photos of Gunnar. In the first, he is a baby in Claire’s arms, and in the second he is school age, grinning into the camera with his top front teeth missing.
    New carpeting led to the stairs and up to hallway on the second floor—forest green with a pattern of tan swirls. It wasn’t thick enough to hide the creaks as I slowly climbed. I hesitated on the landing and watched dust dance in the sunlight seeping in through the slats of the metal blind that covered the window above my head. The same brown paneling I remembered lined the walls. It looked streaky in places, faded like well-worn leather shoes. The door to my parents room stood open, and I stepped inside. I don’t know what I expected to find, but it wasn’t this. The bed was gone, and in its place were a stationary bike, a rowing machine and an apparatus that had weights and pulleys for working out the upper body. Free weights lined the floor in front of bright blue mats like the ones we’d had in gym class. I jumped when I turned and saw myself reflected in a floor to ceiling mirror that lined one wall. My face was pale and my eyes tired. I looked like I needed a hot bath and a good, strong drink. Those would come later.
    My father had taken Jonas’s old bedroom as his own. The double bed and oak headboard were new, but he’d kept the chest 33 of drawers and my mother’s hope chest. I crossed the room and tried to open the chest, but it was locked. I didn’t feel like searching for the key—not yet. The walls were washed-out beige, and I could make out the outlines of Jonas’s posters that Dad had removed without bothering to paint. The one on the far wall had been the famous poster of Farah Fawcett, the one with her sitting nearly sideways in a red bathing suit with her head thrown back and a smile the size of a quarter moon on her face. Jonas had had a crush on her that lasted the entire television run of Charlie’s Angels . A thick duvet covered the bed while curtains in a matching caramel colour hung at the window. If Dad had kept my mother’s ornaments and photos, they were tucked away out of sight, perhaps in the locked chest.
    I walked past the bathroom and kept going to my own bedroom at the end of the hall. The door was shut. I took another deep breath and turned the knob. Once again, the room’s contents surprised me. My father had removed my bed and all my childhood things. In their place were piles of boxes and pieces of old furniture stacked against