And she had rules. She had a great many rules, and she taught them to me the way other mothers teach their children to say please. Always sit where you can see the door. Never give your real birthday to anybody who doesn't need it. Never be the first one to talk and never be the last one to leave. Keep twenty dollars folded in your shoe. Know where the exits are in every building you walk into, and in every car — she made me practice unbuckling my seat belt with my eyes closed, and she kept one of those little red window-breaking hammers clipped to the visor of every car we ever owned, and when I was sixteen and got my first car, a 1988 Tempo with a hole in the floor on the passenger side, she clipped one to my visor too. "Always have a way out," she said. "Always, Etta. Even out of a car. Especially out of a car."
And she dressed us in beige.
I didn't understand it, as a child. I wanted the red coat. I wanted, very badly, when I was nine, a pair of sneakers with pink laces that lit up when you stomped. She bought me tan ones. She bought me tan everything, from Goodwill and Kmart and the church clothes closet, khaki and camel and fawn and sand, and she wore the same, and when I cried about it in the parking lot of a Payless shoe store in Muncie, Indiana, she knelt down on the asphalt in front of me and took both of my shoulders and explained it to me as though I were a grown woman.
"When somebody's looking for you," she said, "they go around asking. Did you see a woman and a little girl. What were they wearing. And if you were wearing a red coat, honey, every single person you passed remembers the red coat. The man at the gas station remembers it. The lady at the bus stop. A red coat gets put on a poster. A red coat gets you found." She brushed my hair back. "But nobody remembers beige. You ask somebody what color coat that woman had on, and they say, I don't know. Brown? Gray? Something. Beige is a woman nobody can describe. You understand me? Beige is how we stay safe."
I understood her. I have understood her my whole life. I stopped crying in that parking lot and I never asked for the pink laces again, and when she died, eight years ago, of an ovarian cancer that she had not told anyone about until it was too late to do anything but make her comfortable, I sat beside her bed at the hospice on Cleveland Avenue in a fawn turtleneck and a pair of khaki slacks, and the nurse who came in to adjust her morphine never once looked at me directly. I was grateful.
I never married. I lived with a man for a while in my late twenties, a gentle, unambitious man who repaired small engines and played bass in a church band, and when he asked me to marry him I said no, and when he asked me why, I could not explain it in any way that made sense to him, and he left. I think what I could not say was that a marriage license is a public record, that a wedding has guests who take photographs, that a husband's name goes on things.
So: I have worked in accounts payable at Brecken Benefits Group for eleven years. I am good at it. I like the clean edges of it. I sit in a cubicle on the third floor with my back to a wall and a clear view of the stairwell door. I take the number 46 bus in from Westerville, or drive my car when the weather is bad, and I eat lunch at my desk, and I leave at four-thirty, neither first nor last. I wear beige. People look past me, and through me, and I have built a whole life in the space their eyes don't land.
And I tell you all this so that you'll understand why, on the morning of the ice storm, I did what I did, and then why I did what I did after.