A Family Resemblance

Sometimes a family resemblance is hard to see...especially if you're not looking for one. And Sabine Knoll isn't.

She's the widow of Victor Knoll and the mother of his three children. She loved him -- deeply -- and even though he's been gone four year

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Oro, ColoradoTHE SLEDMAKER'S SHOP sat on the uninhabited south side of the Eureka River. Joe used his gloved hand to push snow off one window-pane, then scraped at ice beneath until he could see in.An unfinished flyer lay upside down and runnerless on one side of the worktable. Kicksled parts hung from a pipe overhead. Boxed segments leaned against a wall. Saw and plane lay uncovered, shavings curling beneath four years'worth of dust blanketing everything. For Joe it brought to mind Dickens's Miss Havisham; the shop just needed a similarly cobwebbed female, waiting for the sledmaker's return.Stepping away from the shop, he dug into the snow with his poles as he made his way back along the river, over a track as yet uncleared of its fresh, still-falling snow. The afternoon turned dark blue, edging toward the dark of solstice and the year's longest nights.Lights from windows, Christmas lights on eaves and fences, sparkled across the river, making Oro come alive.Only one house sat on this side -- against dense trees and away from any avalanche path, which wouldn't have been the case if the house had been built a few hundred yards to the east or west.It was a cabin constructed in the Arts and Crafts style, possibly from a kit. It was handsome and undoubtedly warm, sound and practical. As well built as the sleds.Although it was five-thirty, no lights burned in that house. A bank of windows glowed at the only other structure on this side of the river, the Gold Mountain Community Center, a ski-lodge type of building, steeply roofed with jutting decks. Cars were parked outside. Others drove up, their headlights illuminating the slow snowfall, as Joe shoed past, and he heard a dance band playing inside. He remembered a sign he'd seen that day at the tiny Oro Market. Oro Family Dance, All Welcome.Curiosity drew him toward the building. He loosened and kicked off his snowshoes and carried them across the parking area, moving behind the blinking lights of a small plow clearing the lot.A six-dollar cover charge, according to the sign outside.And he was not a member of this community. He was an outsider.A small boy, accompanied by a woman with short light-brown hair, attractive with the kind of health that enough money and leisure could provide, took his ten-dollar bill and carefully counted back four ones."Thank you," Joe told him. "Well done." The boy grinned. Missing two front teeth. The band, with a saxophone, lead and bass guitar, keyboards and percussion, called themselves The Montangnards. On the hardwood floor, a couple in their fifties two-stepped to a Beatles song, while a young and extremely striking blond woman danced with a boy who looked about five while holding a younger girl in her arms.She was unmistakable.The white-blond hair in two braids, the arched black eyebrows and heart-shaped face and deep red bow of a mouth, coloring from a fairy tale, all of her surprisingly small and powerful. Again he knew astonishment that she had loved and married Victor Knoll, a man twenty-five years her senior.So those were two of the children. Where was the third? He thought he'd been told that the oldest child was a girl. He could not take his eyes off the woman. Envy, mingled with bitterness, stung his ever-suppurating injury, the wound Victor had so calmly dealt.First, Teresa -- the womanheloved -- had loved Victor. Then this woman had. The sled-maker had not been, in Joe's opinion, a handsome man. However, he'd been one of the most lovable, magnetic people Joe had ever known. Balding, beaky nose, a sense of humor, a smile like the sun, kind. He had married this woman, who was at the time perhaps all of twenty-three or twenty-four years old.She had married him, and those were their children, two of them anyhow.She owned his shop and the land on which it sat.For a hard-felt, hard-swallowing moment, Joe wanted that shop and everything in it. He wanted everything he coul