Prologue
February 1986
“Where’s Michael?” Mother asked, looking up from her bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough.
She scanned the snow blanketed street. Glistening towers of snow sparkled along West Shore Drive and onto drifts engulfing the front yard. Morning kindergarten dismissed at 11:45.
She looked at the clock. Twenty minutes past noon. He should be home by now.
“Jeffrey!” Mother called to Mike’s younger brother. “Grab your jacket. We’re going out for a little walk.”
“Jeffrey!” Mother called again, while picking up the phone to call Michael’s dad, and grabbing Jeffrey’s coat, and turning off the oven.
Jeffrey arrived in the kitchen.
“Hello, this is Dr. Rommel’s wife, could you connect me…” she asked, continuing to look out the window for Michael as she held the phone. “Hi, Duane. Mike’s not home from school yet… I’m a little worried… can you get in the car…”
Mother, yanking Jeffrey, dashed out the door, down the porch steps, and onto the snowy driveway.
Michael pushed hard on the metal bar that opened the door from Cornelia elementary school onto the playground. In the warm building he felt sweaty, wearing his winter jacket, boots, gloves and green wool Edina hat.
As the door opened, ice cold air smacked his cheeks and sneaked all the way through every layer of clothes. The sun sparkled on the glittering crust of snow.
It blinded Mike. Then his eyes adjusted, and he saw the swings, ahead on the right, and the hill beyond the baseball field that led to the street he would follow on his way home.
His boots crunched through the crust. Sometimes his boots held his body on the top layer of hard snow. Then sometimes his boot punched through the snow. His legs started to get tired, so he moved over to the packed path.
He climbed up the hill. Mounds of old snow, plowed into piles with road gravel and sand, edged Kellogg Avenue. He climbed to the top of the icy mess, then placed each boot carefully into footprints on his descent to the street, where his parents had taught him to walk.
There were no sidewalks in Edina, Minnesota. There was too much snow.
From December to March, it was difficult enough to keep the streets and driveways to houses clear.
Mike knew the way home. As he jumped out of the snow pile beside Kellogg, he looked up. The yellow house with white shutters, the one he always saw when he got to the top, was there.
His boots slid easily along the hard packed snow on the street.
“I wonder if Mother is making cookies,” he thought. He was hungry for lunch. “I wish we lived in that house, right next to school.”
He had walked back and forth to school, and the playground, a hundred times. But with the snow covering everything, he paused for a minute in front of the house with the iron railing.
“Which way is it to my house?” he wondered. He wasn’t sure. Right or left?
When he was walking in the snow across the school field and climbing over snowbanks, he was warm. A thin white cloud covered the sun for a minute, and the wind blew harder against his face.
“I’m cold,” he realized. He wasn’t sure what to do. “I could go faster if I wasn’t wearing boots.”
He turned right, staring at each house to see if they looked familiar, like ones he had seen on other walks home. They did not look like houses he had seen before.
He decided to turn around and go back the other way. The road sloped down steeply.
“That’s the stinkhouse.” Mike recognized the small red brick utility building at the bottom of Cornelia school. Everyone called it the stinkhouse because, it smelled bad when you walked past it. He began descending the hill. He wasn’t sure where his house was if he went this way.
A sharp wind gusted behind his back, pushing him down the hill, blowing through everything he was wearing, like a sieve.
“I’m really cold! I don’t know where I’m going! And I’m hungry!” Mike fumed.
He stood at the edge of the street, and turned to look in each direction.
“Where am I ?!”
He climbed into the snow pile beside the road and sat down. He licked a piece of snow off his gloves. He didn’t know what else to do. The snow under his bottom was not wet but so completely frozen it would not melt. It would only make him colder and colder.
“Mike!”
Mike looked up. At the top of the street his mother, his little brother beside her, waved at him. Mother was pointing at something. He looked that way. A maroon van appeared. In a moment the car stopped beside him. His Dad jumped out.
“Mike!”
Mike heard his Dad’s strong, joyful voice. Dad ran around the car to him.
“Are you okay?”
“I wasn’t sure where our house was…” Mike answered.
They were all glad to get into the warm car for the short ride home, where there would be lunch, with homemade cookies.
