Midwinter

It was the twenty-third of December, a Saturday, with nothing about the dawn to show how warm the afternoon would be. It had been that way all week, winter in the mornings, early autumn by two o'clock. Essie, bundled up against the cold, entered her kitchen and wiped the sweat from the south window and looked at how the frost had bearded the flower stalks outside—a bed of canna lilies; she had let them stay up until they were too tough to pull.

Her breath smoked. She crumpled up newspapers, laid them in the cookstove, put strips of kindling on the paper and plank ends on top of that. She struck a match on the stove side and put the flame to the newspapers, watching the fire catch and leap. Then she put the lids in the stove-eye holes and rubbed her hands over them. When they were too hot to keep holding, and when she could spit on the stovetop and hear a sizzle, she put coffee on to boil.

She stepped outside to get more wood. Although this was a weekend, she could hear a knocking and pounding from across the field, more new houses going up. She had put a dress on over the old jeans and flannel shirt that she slept in and a coat over that. Once black, the coat was now so old and worn that it had turned a greenish-gray no-color. She pulled the cap edges down over her ears and bent over the woodpile. Without her apron she couldn't carry much, but she didn't need much. An armful of wood for Essie was lighter than it once had been; if she tried a full load, her elbows and wrists started aching.

Back in the house she pulled her chair right up to the cook-stove after pouring herself some coffee and sweetening it. Three spoonsful of sugar, heaping ones at that. She sipped and waited for the strong coffee and the sugar to give her strength. She didn't know exactly how long she sat. When she rose to refill her cup, the sun was moving over the woods near her house. Her alarm clock in the other room told her it was nine o'clock.

Essie had her government check on the mantelpiece and needed to cash it. They did that for her at a place up on the highway, an office tucked in between a drugstore and a dollar shop. The place charged a fee. She wasn't sure how much; she always just took the cash they handed her and left. She hid most of the money behind a brick in the fireplace edge and knotted up the rest of it in a handkerchief.

Mrs. Grimes stopped in every week or so to make sure that Essie was all right and to fuss at her about check-cashing, telling Essie that those places charged outrageous prices, and she—Mrs. Grimes—could do it for nothing. "You endorse the check, I take it straight to my bank, and bring the money right back to you." But that would mean showing Mrs. Grimes the check. Essie always thanked her and said, "I reckon it's all right the way it is." That made Mrs. Grimes huff and puff and shake her head.

The check place did a big business on Saturday mornings. Essie found mostly a bunch of Mexicans in line, getting paychecks cashed and sending money orders to their folks. Two or three of the men recognized Essie. They smiled at her and motioned to her to come and get in front of them, but she smiled back at them and took her place at the end of the line. She should have come on Friday, she reckoned, straight from her mailbox to the check store. But she'd had ironing to do and didn't want to stop in the middle of it. Anyway she didn't know that Friday would be much better than Saturday morning for check-cashing.

She had a walk of a little more than a mile back to...