Cold

“You could come back.” Wresting her coat tighter, Marta Novak watched from the hilltop as children on snow saucers tumbled fearless into virgin snow. Ignoring the oppressive, cloud-filled sky, they raced laughing to try again. Envying their parents, she turned to her son. “It isn’t the end of the world, you know.”

Taylor shook his head. “That part of my life is over.”

Through sheer force of will, Marta had succeeded in coaxing him out of his double-wide, gotten him out into the air. She lacked even the rudimentary level of quit needed to stop herself from stepping out in front of him and getting—as best she could, being a foot shorter—up in his face. Enraged at the redolence of alcohol, she reached up to grab the sleeve of his parka hoping to focus his attention. She tugged. “C’mon.”

As they descended the slope, he turned to her. “Look, I appreciate...you know. But at this point, I need some space.”

His father had used the same excuse—needed his space.

“You’re better than that. You can work through it.”

She had married young, college romance gone too far. It hadn’t lasted.

After her husband left, she’d raised Taylor alone. She built her world around her child, eventually seeing him into Johns Hopkins. That accomplished, she sold her Louisiana home and took a Foreign Service posting. Whenever on stateside leave, she’d rent a place in Baltimore to be near him. Then, in his fourth year, he was gone. No note. No nothing. Just gone.

North Dakota was unfamiliar to her, snow foreign to her New Orleans upbringing, a sometimes element in her Washington DC life, unheard of at her Foreign Service postings. Nothing about it appealed. She wondered at her son’s decision to nest in shouting distance of the Canadian border. The cold astonished her.

Hands deep in her pockets, cotton gloves on freezing fingers. She was glad to be moving, at least, down off the crest where the wind had them at its mercy. “Taylor, why are you even here?”

“Because I am.” Flat. Detached.

She should have taken the response as a warning he didn’t want to talk, but she had come for answers. “Seriously. You could work anywhere. Did you come here for a girl?”

“No.” He turned to look at her. “I came to get away. Okay? Because I knew...”

She waited for him to finish but he’d gone silent. The winter air magnified the crunch of their boots on the broken ground.

Finally, she said, “Because you thought I wouldn’t be able to find you?”

He kept walking. “Something like that.”

She soldiered on. Tried to lighten the mood. “Joke’s on you, then.”

He laughed. “I’ve got bad news, Mom. I’m not a doctor.”

Snow had drifted up against her rental car. She was due back in Washington, needed to get moving. She stopped next to the car, looked long and hard at the double-wide. “You like living in that thing?”

He shrugged. “Don’t want anything I can’t walk away from.”

She recognized the words. His father had said them about himself. How could they be so alike when they had so seldom been in each other’s company?

She unlocked the passenger door, struggled to keep her footing as she edged around to the driver’s side. “So what’s the plan?”

He got in. “No plan. Keep stocking shelves, work things out.”

Sitting across from him at the dingy motel diner, Marta opened her bag, checked for cash. “Do you need money, Taylor?”

“No, Mom.” He looked out the window at highway traffic. “That’s not what I need.”

She sensed something. “What, then?”

He didn’t speak. She followed his gaze toward the highway and the drifts beyond, sky the color of dirty snow. He was grown and she had to let him go.

No one had ever asked her if she had kids. She knew she didn’t seem the type. Smart enough to know this was a problem she couldn’t solve, she did the best she could. “You know I’ll find you wherever you go. You know that.”

He pulled back the hood of his parka. “Yeah. I do, Mom. But you don’t have to.”

She gave her attention to the menu, grateful that he did the same. Maybe he was right. Maybe that part of both their lives was over.

Richard Schreck is the author of over 30 non-fiction pieces and a former publication editor for a large professional association. “Cold” explores a fictional world he is developing in Brain Game, a novel set in Baltimore and New Orleans. Brain Game background stories also appear in The Razor, Gargoyle, The Loch Raven Review, The Write Launch, and other literary magazines. See links to these stories at richardschreck.com and commentary at Instagram @richardschreckwriting and Bluesky @richardschreck.bsky.social.