The first snow of the year came to Duluth on the morning of Linnea's first birthday, and by the time Nora Brandt walked back up Tenth Avenue East with a bag of candles and a sheet cake balanced against her hip, it had already covered her suitcases.
She saw them from the corner. Three of them, lined up on the porch of the narrow blue house like guests who had arrived too early and were too polite to knock. The big gray roller she had brought from St. Paul eighteen months ago. The green duffel with the broken strap. The small hard-shell case with the faded airline tag from a trip to Montreal she had taken back when she was a person who took trips. Someone had set them neatly beside the porch swing, handles up, and the snow had settled on top of each one in a soft white lid.
For a moment her mind refused to file them under anything. She thought: someone is visiting. She thought: Daniel is cleaning out the attic. Then she saw the clear plastic bin beside the duffel, the one with her winter boots and her nursing pillow and the stack of library books she kept meaning to return, and she understood that someone had gone into her room, emptied her closet, carried her life down a flight of stairs, and placed it outside in the weather.
The cake box was getting soggy at one corner. She stood on the sidewalk and held it level, because the frosting said HAPPY 1ST BIRTHDAY LINNEA in purple script and she had paid an extra six dollars for the little sugar loon.
Through the front window she could see the living room strung with paper garland. Pink and gold. Brooke's colors. Brooke Sundquist, who had a way of saying we about the house that made Nora's teeth hurt, was standing on a step stool taping a giant foil number one to the wall above the couch, and Daniel was holding the stool steady with one hand and a coffee mug with the other. Neither of them looked toward the porch. In the corner, in the wooden high chair Nora had sanded and oiled herself, Linnea was gnawing on a teething ring and watching Brooke's balloons with grave suspicion.
Nora went up the steps. The snow squeaked under her boots. She set the cake on the porch swing because there was nowhere else to put it, and she tried the door, and the door was locked.
She put her key in the lock and it turned halfway and stopped, and she stood there with her hand on the knob for a long second before she understood that, too.
Daniel opened the door before she could knock. He must have seen her at last. He stepped out onto the porch in his socks and pulled the door almost closed behind him, and the cold came off him the way it came off the lake, a flat, unbothered cold.