One Frosty Night. Janice Kay Johnson

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       CHAPTER FOUR

      THEY DID SHOVEL, working as a team except for the occasional impulse to pack a snowball and chase each other all over the yard. By the time they actually made it to the road, they were all breathing like dragons, red-cheeked and good-humored. Olivia, at least, was feeling the strain in her shoulders and upper arms.

      She turned and surveyed their accomplishment as well as the trampled front yard. “If only it weren’t still snowing.”

      “Yeah, but it’s not coming down that hard.” Ben groped in his jeans pocket and produced his keys. “Catch,” he told Carson. “Why don’t you move the Cherokee up here?”

      “Me?” The boy’s face brightened. “Yeah! Cool.” He trotted toward the SUV.

      “Does he have his license yet?” Olivia asked.

      “No, but he’s taking driver’s ed this semester. I’ve been letting him practice.” Ben grimaced. “Not so much in the snow, though.”

      Olivia suppressed her smile as they both watched Carson give a cheerful wave and hop into the red Jeep Cherokee. “There’s not much he can run into between there and here.” She turned on her heel. “Except the garage doors, I guess. Mom might not appreciate that.”

      “Yeah, and us.” Ben’s hand on her arm drew her up the driveway. “Although I have taught him to brake.”

      “You were such a stodgy driver for a teenage boy.” Olivia cursed herself the minute the words were out. Reminders of their past were not a good idea.

      “That’s a compliment, right?” he said, deliberately echoing her from a minute ago.

      She had to laugh.

      “He’s doing okay for a kid. In fact, he’s sure he has it all down pat, which means he’s cocky.”

      She wondered at the shadow that crossed his face after that. What was he thinking as he watched Carson carefully maneuver the Cherokee up the driveway, braking neatly in front of the garage only a few feet from them?

      “He’s on the basketball team, right?” she asked.

      “Huh?” He turned his head. “Carson? Yeah. He’s not real happy because he didn’t start Friday night. There’s something going on with the team. I don’t know what.”

      “You can’t exactly go berate the coach because your kid didn’t get enough playing time, can you?”

      He made a sound in his throat that she recognized as frustration. “No, I have to step carefully. In this case...”

      The driver’s side door slammed. Carson ostentatiously stashed the keys in his own pocket. Ben’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t say anything.

      “Did your dad tell you he helped me learn to parallel park?” Olivia asked.

      “Sort of,” Ben muttered, and she elbowed him.

      “I passed the driver’s test, didn’t I?”

      “Pure luck.”

      Her elbow brought a sharp exhalation this time. “Skill.”

      Carson watched them with obvious interest. “You guys, like, hooked up when you were in high school, didn’t you?”

      “A very long time ago,” Olivia agreed, not looking at Ben as she led the way onto the front porch. “I got together with a bunch of old high school friends Friday night. Nicki was in town,” she said as an aside to Ben. “It got me thinking. I was sixteen years old when your dad and I broke up, and that was sixteen years ago.”

      “You were my age?” The horror in the teenager’s voice made both adults laugh, although Ben’s was more subdued than Olivia’s.

      “Well, I was a little older.” Ben’s tone was cautious. “Eighteen.”

      “Weird,” his kid pronounced.

      They stamped the snow from their boots, stepped inside and took off their parkas, hats and gloves in the entryway, laying them on the tile floor. Leaving boots there, too, they padded in stocking feet to the kitchen. The spicy smell of baking worked like a beacon.

      “Mrs. B.” Ben went to her mother and kissed her cheek. “Good to see you under better circumstances.”

      Marian’s smile dimmed at the reminder that their last meeting was at the funeral, but she relaxed again when he introduced Carson. She cut generous slabs of a cinnamon-flavored cake, and they sat talking while they ate it and sipped coffee. Perhaps inevitably, Olivia’s mother remarked on how proud she’d been of Ben for starting the initiative to bury that poor girl.

      Carson ducked his head. Death, it occurred to Olivia, didn’t often become quite so real to kids.

      “It’s so hard to believe no one at the high school recognized her,” Marian said. “Are kids talking about it still?”

      Ben’s gaze rested inscrutably on his son’s averted face. “Not as much as I’d have expected. Carson?”

      He gave a jerky shrug. “There’s not that much to say. I mean, since no one knew her.”