The snow began falling in big wet flakes like postage stamps. The weather report said it was going to be the heaviest dump of the season with six to eight inches by morning.
Billy Trimble watched it splintering down from his living room window with skepticism. They never got it right. Charles Street glistened under street lamps. Cars were rolling by.
He could still make his 7:00 morning meeting without much trouble.
He wanted the snow for his children more than anything. Colby and Scott loved to play in the white stuff. It had been a lean Christmas, but he’d started a new job as sales manager for a small association selling memberships and he’d managed to make his mortgage payments for the first time in months.
It felt good not to be scanning the street for suspicious cars or people watching his house.
Upstairs he could hear his wife reading The Little Engine That Could to his five-year old daughter.
Colby loved that story.
Halfway up the steps he paused to see how beautiful they both were, nestled together.
Our engine has broken down, and the good little girls and boys on the other side won’t have any toys to play with or good food to eat. . .
Scott was still sloshing around in the tub—his elbows and knees rubbing against the bottom.
He wrapped the boy in his favorite “doggie” towel complete with basset hound ears. He lifted up the three-year old and kissed his wet cheeks.
“Please don’t forget the trash,” Dawn said, with an exhausted tone in her voice, and continued reading.
“Yep,” he said. He’d missed a couple of trash nights since he’d started working again. He’d been unemployed for six months before landing a new job. He’d lost a lucrative position that he’d worked ten years to obtain. The termination letter stated “violation of company policies” and he couldn’t get any of his co-workers to give him a reference.
His wife didn’t know everything that went down.
“I told you this was going to happen,” Dawn had scolded him. “I told you to get out and find another job years ago.”
“I sent resumes out.”
He’d been offered two positions in different cities and declined them both.
“You didn’t try hard enough and now we’re fucked.”
Dawn wanted out of Baltimore. A New Englander by birth, she hated the potholes, the speed cameras, gunshot wounds, unwed mothers, dirt bikes, and abandoned homes.
“My kids are starting to get that awful accent,” she announced with disdain.
Billy loved his hometown. He remembered when he had nothing but the splinters in his fingers from the bleachers in Memorial Stadium. He’d go for long walks down 33rd street and stand where the stadium used to be, pretending to hear the deafening roar of the crowd. He strolled the back alleys of his neighborhood searching for sno-ball stands.
“Rome is burning and all you care about is Johnny Unitas,” Dawn said.
In the end he couldn’t let go of the power, the intoxication of being in charge.
He’d become a fixture on the global sales circuit and was leading a double life. He had Diamond privileges and business class upgrades anywhere in the world. The clients wanted to be wined and dined, taken to strip clubs.
He kept telling himself, “That’s how it’s done.”
He’d been sober for five years. But the strip clubs in places like Nashville and Atlanta evolved into brothels in Prague, Beijing and Bangkok. These places intrigued him.
“What the hell is this?” Dawn once found an opened box of edible condoms from a trip to Frankfurt.
“Digger put those in my shaving kit, as a joke,” he said, sleepy-eyed and jet-lagged. It was easy to blame Simon Diggs, the international sales rep who lived in Manchester. He couldn’t get enough of the whores. Diggs had a $5,000 a year habit until he found a way to expense it.
“Disgusting.”
Dawn was ten years Billy’s junior and he’d taken advantage of that. She had made him so nervous that he could hardly speak when they first met.
“You have one chance,” she told him after the condom episode. “Understand this, if I catch you, I won’t be here when you come home. Don’t look for me.”
“Daddy lives on a plane,” Colby told Dawn one night.
Billy read a book about great white sharks to Scott and dozed-off, snoring loudly.
He woke after midnight, stepped barefoot into a pair of loafers, and headed downstairs. The snow had picked up, and was sticking. It tingled against his ankles as he rolled the large green trash receptacle down the driveway to the curb. Billy often wondered whether the investigators had ever sifted through his trash. He remembered the day he was escorted out by legal counsel. He’d been friendly with Jim Hecht, the corporate attorney. They had worked on a number of contracts together.
“I need your briefcase,” Hecht said.
“It’s mine, Jim. I bought it with my own money,” Billy said. He started emptying the items onto his conference table.
“See, it’s all my stuff.” He handed him a copy of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous like a peace offering.
“I’m so sorry, Bill,” Hecht said. “These are your personal items.”
Billy didn’t care. He never felt ashamed about his alcoholism. They went down the staircase and out the back of the building together.
“I respect you,” Hecht said, on the sidewalk outside the office.
“Same to you,” said Billy. “I will make this right.”
“You shouldn’t say anything more to me,” said Hecht.

Billy was the first to rise and see the fresh white carpet of untouched snow like he did as a boy. He had gazed out of apartment windows in the county, his brother at his side, hanging on every school closing from the radio. That was when his mother was single. When she remarried, they lived in their first house in Sweet Air and snow blanketed the cornfields. No way for the buses to come down that street. His Nana lived with them too and once scolded he and his brother for throwing snowballs at salt trucks.
“You boys is messing with the county,” she said, shaking a finger at them.
Now he lived in a neighborhood now that would make his dead Italian grandmother proud—a place where their car wheels had never touched the road. He prayed every morning like she did, on his knees at the window, pleading for one more day with his wife and children.
Since losing his job, he often stood in the living room window and watched the street. When cars pulled up to the curb near the house, he braced himself, ducked down and watched their every move, expecting to be served by federal agents.
The snow had stopped, but he couldn’t see the pavement anywhere. He called the office—closed for the day. It was the happiest he’d felt in months. He pulled out the flour and the eggs, and started mixing pancake batter for his family.
The investigation dragged on for eleven months. He’d been given more responsibility. It looked like he might survive it.
“You’re in the clear,” Hecht had told him. “We’re finished with you. But we have a couple more people to talk to.”
They had scoured 20,000 emails, but hadn’t spoken with Simon Diggs yet. They were still auditing his activities. Billy’s signature had approved his best friend’s decade-long bacchanalian frenzy.
Billy had taken “Digger” aside near the Berlin Wall.
“I will lie and say I had no idea. You said they were supper clubs. It will be your word against mine.”
“It’s your name on the papers, mate.”
“Who rescued you from that two bedroom house next to the industrial estate?”
“I’ve worked my fucking arse off for you,” said Diggs. “I spent years away from my family building this business—missed dance recitals, auditions, plays. Whole childhoods, Billy.”
“I need your help.”
“Piss off.”
He had damaging information on Diggs. There were apartments in Dubai that had been purchased from customers. The corruption started with the brothels but it replicated like an aggressive cancer.
“Admit it. You made a mistake. You might be able to save your job,” Diggs said.
Billy started back in the program. He hadn’t been to a meeting in more than a year because he knew he couldn’t cheat and still be in recovery.
He also found an attorney.

After breakfast, he worked on the marketing plan for his boss until he heard the scrape of the shovel on the driveway. Dawn had started clearing it without him. She did the same thing with the lawnmower when he let the grass get too long.
It annoyed him and made him laugh at the same time. It was their little joke.
He pulled on his rubber boots and headed outside. The sun was out and the snow was heavy in the shovel. Billy let the kids pummel him with snowballs. He took over in the driveway while Dawn cleared the sidewalk. She finished her section and took the kids inside. Melting snow pelted the downspouts. He dumped the last spade-full and set his shovel against the front door.
Billy refreshed his coffee and went back to work on the kitchen counter with his laptop.
Dawn came halfway down the stairs.
“The Reynolds just called from across the street. Someone stole your shovel. There were four or five men together and one walked off with it. Miss Liz saw the whole thing. They ran down towards Warrenton.”
“I’ll get it back,” he said, and put his boots back on.
“Just let it go,” she said. “We’ll buy another one. They were going door-to-door asking if people needed their driveways cleared.”
Dawn was a mixture of Irish and Portuguese and her eyes glowed like sapphires when she smiled.
He felt compelled to fix the situation.
“I’ll just drive around the neighborhood and have a look.”
“Finish your work.”
Billy pulled the Honda Pilot out of the driveway and noticed sets of footprints headed down the street and around the corner. He drove down Warrenton and took a left on Overhill Road. About halfway down the hill, a group of Hispanic-looking men were walking from the street down a long driveway. They resembled the men who worked on the lawns in the summers.
The second one in line held a shovel with a tightly-curved green spade. There weren’t many like it in a neighborhood where most people hired ploughs. He was sure it was the one he bought at Home Depot.
He pulled to the side and left the car running. He got out and waved his hands at them.
“Hola,” he said. “Hola amigos.”
“Buenas tardes.”
They turned around and started coming toward him. They were a short and wiry band of men. They stopped and fanned out in a semicircle around him.
“Someone took my shovel,” he said. “It’s that one right there,” he pointed at the green one.
“That’s my shovel,” he said.
“No,” said the shortest man in the group.
“It’s our shovel.”
“No tengo nada,” the man with the shovel said.
He wore a yellow flannel shirt, untucked. A small ragged goatee covered his chin and his hair was cut in a bowl. He was taller than the rest with a gaunt, wind-burned face. His eyes were slanted, almost Asian, and hungry looking.

The first interrogation almost a year ago continued to stay with him. It was the day before he was leaving for a business trip to China and a friend in HR had given him a hint.
“Is it the nice lawyers or the mean ones?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “They are from an outside firm.”
His friend didn’t respond.
Hecht was waiting for Billy in his office and instructed him to sit down. The two attorneys at the table were dressed like G-men. They had black suits, thin black ties, and they bludgeoned him with questions–the same ones over and over again for three hours.
Hecht sat only three feet away, staring at him, watching him react to the questions being asked.
A heavy-set man with blonde hair and bloodshot eyes did most of the questioning. His face was splotchy, as though the faces of those he’d beaten into confessions had been grafted onto his.
“What happened to the paperwork on that deal, Trimble? Did you throw it away? Did you think it was over with? You threw it away, didn’t you?”
“No sir, I didn’t,” he said. “It’s on my desk.”
He stared straight into the man’s eyes and answered the questions. He hadn’t lied, but corners had been cut and it was only a matter of time before they would make the connections. They were staring right at it.
“You have a choice, William. Cooperate with me now or go in front of a grand jury.”
After it was over, Billy drove home and went straight to the master bedroom without saying a word to his wife and children. He took off his clothes and got under the covers.
The interrogation continued.
“Did you ever accept money from any of your clients?”
“I did not.”
He pulled the covers over his head and listened to his teeth rattle in his mouth.
On the day after he was terminated, he’d gone down into the basement and stared up at the chin-up bar affixed to the ceiling of his workshop. He grabbed a stepladder and held the bars. He’d hated pull-ups as a kid in gym class. He undid his belt and hooked it around the bar, pulling the leather strap down hard to see if it would hold his weight. If they came after him, he had options.
That same morning, Billy walked to a coffee shop on Cold Spring Lane. Waiting for his espresso, he glanced at the local gazette. On page two, there was a picture of his daughter Colby at the Waverly market.
“I like the flowers and the blueberry pies,” the caption read. She looked like the happiest kid in the world. He folded the newsprint into squares and put it into his wallet. Often, he took it out to see his daughter’s face.
In those first days he had wanted to tell the whole story and come clean. He had done despicable things.
“I wouldn’t say anything,” said Lyle, his attorney.
“I owe them the truth.”
“This isn’t the third grade, Billy. The principal isn’t going to slap your wrist and send you back to class.”
Lyle had dated his mother when Billy was 8 years old. He’d helped the family make tuition payments at Archbishop Curley High School.
Lyle was pretty sure the investigation wasn’t going any further but he couldn’t guarantee it.
“I have it at 6-1 that it goes nowhere. You need to trust me.”
Things got better slowly. He started doing chin-ups in the basement. He experienced bird symphonies, sunlight, and early summer breezes that engulfed him as he rode his bike to the Homewood Field with Scott in the baby seat. They chased geese across the football field and climbed the steps in the grandstands. He took the kids to playgrounds and to Tamber’s for milkshakes. The city had never been more beautiful.

“That’s my shovel.” Billy stepped toward the man.
“No sir,” the leader said. “Es nuestro.”
“Give me the shovel, or I’ll call the police.” Slowly, Billy reached out his hand to take it from him.
“It will be my word against yours, and I have a witness.”
The wind-burned man raised his shovel, and the four other men did the same. They moved in around him, looking at each other, smiling.
“My neighbor saw you take it.”
The sound of snow falling through the branches crackled above him. He looked back at his car and the smoke rising from the exhaust pipe. He thought of paperwork being done at the Northern District and a night or two in central booking for the man with a goatee. If the guy was completely off the grid he might get sent back to whatever country he was from. He thought of himself in the Baltimore City Jail or worse, dead.
Two of the men were closer to his car than he was. It was a remote stretch of city road where the homes sat far off the street, ensconced in trees.
Through the side window, Billy glanced at the car seats Colby and Scott sat in every day.
I think I can-I think I can-I think I can.
He left the men standing with their shovels cocked, and drove home. On the way back, he thought about how close he’d come.
“I would have divorced you.” Dawn had told him. “If you’d gone to jail, I would have taken the kids to my parents in Rhode Island.”
He could hear water from melted snow rushing in the drains as he walked up to his house. Inside, the clothes the kids had worn in the snow tumbled in the dryer. The rims of their mugs on the counter were smudged with hot chocolate. He headed upstairs to see them.