Cold Comfort (3 page)

It was clear this man was the love of Minnie’s life. When I was kid, I’d heard talk that he was her fiancé who’d died in the war.

Minnie never married. And my aunt wasn’t the type to dwell or be downtrodden. She barreled on through, as life for her was about doing, not thinking.
Gotta keep movin’
was her favorite expression. And working in the kitchen always seemed the perfect means for her to achieve that goal. Adjusting the gas on the stove and cutting and peeling vegetables was her concept of psychotherapy.

That afternoon, as she sat at the kitchen table and ripped up pieces of bread that she would use to stuff the bird the next day, I had a hunch that Minnie wasn’t really working alone. In her memory, I imagined she was resurrecting all the Thanksgivings and traditions that came before. By doing so, she wasn’t making dinner for just the two of us. She was honoring all the folks who had once enriched her life and mine, those who had come and gone, passing through this world before moving on to the next. Her efforts, in and of themselves, seemed an act of prayer and gratitude.

I was never a cook, outside of popping leftovers and prepackaged frozen dinners into a microwave, but I did what I could to help—mostly washing, drying and putting away an endless stream of dishes, pots and pans. One year on my birthday, Minnie, as a gag gift, wrapped up one of her three-by-five recipe cards jotted with directions for how to make a hard-boiled egg. I was essentially a kitchen and culinary illiterate and had no desire to further that line of education.

Maybe that’s why I was so intrigued, watching the effort she put forth into fussing over the broth and the tiny meatballs for her Italian Wedding Soup; the grind of her arm and the point of her elbow as she stirred a huge pot of tomato sauce infused with the pungent scent of garlic and sweet-smelling, imported San Marzano tomatoes. While the broth and red gravy simmered on low, she doled out a mound of flour as high as a miniature Mount Etna on a wooden board, cracked some eggs into the well at the center and whipped up a batch of fresh pasta for her homemade manicotti. I could tell she was preparing a lot more than just what she needed for the two of us.

“What are you going to do with all of these?” I asked.

“Eat them.”

“
All
of them?”

“No, we’ll have a few tomorrow. And I promised Lenora, the lady next store, that I’d give her the rest to serve when her children and grandchildren come to visit next week. They freeze nicely.”

“How much are you charging her for them?”

“Charging?” Minnie chuckled. “No. She’s promised to foot the cab fare for Bingo over at Saints Peter and Paul for the next month.”

I nodded. It didn’t sound like a bad deal.

Aunt Minnie snapped Smartphone photos of the soup, the gravy and manicotti through each stage of the process, and she gave me simple tasks to do, “Wash this… Peel that… Dole out the cheese mixture evenly on the fresh-cut pasta squares…”

All the while we worked,
Days of Our Lives
humming in the background, my mind unspooled the events of the day. I found myself thinking about Jack again, that “guy- who broke my heart in college,” who now owned the fish store. When was the last time I’d thought about him—
really
thought about him? I grinned, remembering his comment from earlier that day, the one about Aunt Minnie thinking the Pilgrims were Italian.

At one point, Aunt Minnie peered over her bifocals and said, “Okay, spill it. Who’s got your heart?”

“My heart?” Heat crawled into my face. “Nobody. Nobody’s got my heart.”

“Oh, I know love when I see it.”

“Believe me, it’s not love. It’s
definitely
not love. It’s just that I was surprised to find that the guy who owns the fish store is actually someone I went to college with.”

“Giacomo?” She peeled off her glasses. Her eyes were wide.

“Yes, but I know him as Jack.”

“Jack? But Giacomo translates to James.”

“I think Jack’s his nickname. Just like some people call me A.M.”

“Well, he’s a good boy,” she said. “Comes from a good family. His uncle manned that shop for as long as I can remember. When he died a couple of years back, Jack took over the place. He’s made it his own, but his uncle would be proud, how he’s continuing the family tradition. And his fish is the best, the freshest.”

“I’m sure he’s very good and responsible at what he does. But it’s sad, though. He told me that he couldn’t make a good enough living using his arts degree. That’s why he took over the place.”

“Sad?
You
might be sad, but he’s certainly not,” she said. “Maybe when you’re as old as I am, you’ll see that life has a way of working out the way it’s supposed to. I mean, look at you—you always thought you’d be a commercial photographer and now you’re a photojournalist.”

“Yeah, but at least I’m still a photographer.”

“And I’d bet that Jack’s still an artist, at heart, even if he makes his living as a fish monger,” she said. “He’s done a lot to preserve the heritage of Little Italy in Federal Hill. And the folks in this town, they just love him—and he loves them back.”

“Yeah, well, he always
was
lovable.”

Aunt Minnie crooked her head. “A-ha. The L-word... Do I detect a little bitterness in that tone?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

Aunt Minnie pasted a suspicious gaze to mine. Then she leaned across the table and poked a crooked finger at my heart. “I sense tears in there.”

“No. No tears. No more left.”

“A-ha. But
there
were tears?”

I swung my sights away from hers and nodded sheepishly. “It was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, well, the heart has a very long memory.”

“Not my heart. It’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh, that’ll be the day.” Aunt Minnie burst out laughing. “
Your
heart is like an elephant. It never forgets!”

As she said this, I was distracted by colorful graphics filling the TV screen. The network had broken away from the telecast of
Days of Our Lives
. The words BREAKING NEWS: THANKSGIVING NOR’EASTER flashed on the screen. I put up my hands in a time-out gesture then reached for the television remote control and turned up the volume. The weather forecaster said something about things shaping up into a “white Thanksgiving” while pointing to a map of the United States. He moved a finger all the way up the coast from the Carolinas to New York and swerved right, sweeping over the rectangle of Connecticut and settling upon the small square that comprised Rhode Island.

He spouted words like
low-pressure area…converging air masses…severe
flooding
,
coastal erosion
,
hurricane force
winds,
blizzard conditions
…downed power lines…freezing temperatures…

The report was capped off with, “This storm could dump as much as thirty inches of snow upon The Ocean State before it’s all over. Be prepared folks…”

Aunt Minnie and I looked from the TV to each other.

“All the leaves aren’t even off the trees yet,” I said.

“But it’s definitely cold enough out there,” said Aunt Minnie. “I better make sure I’ve got my cellar survival kit up-to-date.”

“What survival kit?”

“When you’ve lived through the Depression, you learn to stock-pile for times like these. I used to have a few days’ worth of canned goods stashed down there.”

“Let’s not jump the gun,” I told her, switching TV channels in search of another weather report to confirm the news. “For all the modern technology, meteorologists still can’t predict the weather any more than betting forecasters can predict the winning thoroughbreds over at Narragansett Race Track.”

“A warning is a warning for a reason.” Aunt Minnie reached for a dish towel. She wiped her hands then pushed her chair away from the table, scraping it upon the linoleum floor.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I better make sure we have everything we need, just in case we’re snowed in for the weekend.”

I gestured my hands, broadly, around the kitchen. The counters were laden and buckling with all kinds of food. “Well, I certainly don’t think we’ll starve.”

But I don’t think Aunt Minnie heard me, as the thick, heavy soles of her orthopedic shoes were already clip-clopping down the wooden cellar stairs.

Three

The stash of emergency provisions stacked in old fashioned metal crates in the corner of Aunt Minnie’s basement could have been worthy of the Smithsonian Museum. Elbow grease and damp rags loosened the aged grime, unveiling labels for cans of soup and tuna fish, jars of cocktail franks, beans, and veggies.

The camera app on my aunt’s phone was getting some workout as she snapped picture after picture. “Wonder if any of this stuff would fetch anything on
Antiques Roadshow,
” she said.

“How
fetching
is botulism?”

Some of the cans were lopsided, buckling outward, as if the contents inside were vying to get out. It was obvious these rations were produced long before the advent of expiration dates.

That left the Thanksgiving Day preparations to be temporarily deferred, as we spent about an hour sorting and weeding through the supplies and filling garbage bags. When we were through, we were left with a box of candles that had weathered the years just fine, an ancient pocket transistor radio and two dented, metal flashlights—all of which were useless without working batteries.

Back upstairs in the kitchen, the all-weather TV channel hummed in the background while Aunt Minnie worked up another shopping list of things we might need to brave the storm.

“It’s not so much the snow amount totals we’re anticipating, but rather, because autumn came late this year, we’re concerned about the trees. With leaves still clinging to branches, a heavy, wet snow is likely to result in downed limbs and power lines… And with the sudden dip in temperature, folks could be stranded in the cold for days…”

In no time, I was back out on the streets of Federal Hill in search of water and batteries. The wheels on that tired old shopping cart shimmied as if in protest as I pushed it along Atwells Avenue. The afternoon sun hung low, shrouded by dim gray skies, and the cold quickly penetrated my gloved fingers and toes tucked inside wool. Aunt Minnie was right—it sure felt like snow.

I made a beeline for the stationary-turned-convenience store. The shelves already looked picked over, but I managed to scavenge as many quart and individual-sized plastic bottles of spring water as would fit into the cart then topped things off by wiping out the rack of C and D-size batteries.

The heavy cart groaned as I pushed it out of the shop. The weight of the contents inside made it hard to steer, but I maneuvered it with great care past several shops with make-shift street displays featuring shovels and rock salt. Aunt Minnie was certainly not alone in her quest to batten down the hatches, as the rest of the Federal Hill District seemed to be doing the same.

En route to Aunt Minnie’s place, my Smartphone chimed. I cringed, my worn and tired gaze stretching into the threatening skies above.

I pulled out my phone and read a text:
& get firewood—as much as u can carry
.

I looked down at the cart.

Where, exactly, does she want me to carry it—on my head?

There wasn’t an inch of space to be had among the water and batteries. And who, in this neighborhood, would actually have firewood to sell?

Dutchie, the owner of the vegetable store, was the only possibility I could think of, so off I went.

If it wasn’t for him personally knowing Aunt Minnie, I don’t think he ever would’ve parted with the one small bundle of dust-covered kindling and firewood he had parked under a display of Bosc pears. But he was eager to help and even anchored the bundle atop the cart with a bungee cord.

It wasn’t a lot of wood, but I figured it was at least something to tide us over.

“This ought to hold until you get back to Minnie’s,” Dutchie said, making sure the wood was secure for the trip.

He smiled and gave me a pat on the back as I left the store with that survival kit on wheels.

If I thought maneuvering the cart was a challenge before, with the addition of the firewood it was now like navigating an airplane down a runway as narrow as an alleyway. And the heavy, unwieldiness now made me realize the uphill incline of the streets leading back to Atwells Avenue.

As I neared Aunt Minnie’s block, the graded handicapped accessible curb en route was barricaded with orange cones. When I moved closer, I noticed plywood covering the area, as if they were doing construction or there had been a water-main break. That meant, in order to traverse the intersection, I’d have to heft the cumbersome cart off a high, six-inch curb and down onto the cross street.

With my fingers firmed around the handle, I slowly rolled the cart forward while tilting it back onto the larger, rear wheels. But as I eased into the final descent, the cart dropped harder than I expected. The contents shifted and the top-heaviness of the firewood bore down, exacerbating the force of gravity. The cart landed upright, but it lurched and twisted in the direction of the incline of the side street.

For a moment, I stood there in the street, my heart pounding and long breaths of exasperated relief escaping me as a few cars sped past. The traffic rustled leaves that scurried along the ground. Then I repositioned the cart, so I could push it out in front of me. With one hand on the bar and the other atop the firewood, I kicked back on the rear wheels, but the grated metal bottom swiftly caved open and the bottles of spring water suddenly released, charging like hungry hounds down the incline of the side street. In reflex, I pushed the cart forward, on all four wheels, in an effort to stop the hemorrhaging. But more than half of the water bottle supply scurried away, bouncing happily down the street. My chin dropped. Whatever triumph I’d experienced just seconds before had turned instantly to disaster.

A car suddenly slowed up alongside me. “Well, well, well. Are you trying to make a mess of our fine city?”