The Pickup List and the Blizzard

Seven miles in the white

Norm came in stamping snow off his boots while I was pulling on my snow pants. He took one look at me and did not ask. Then I told him anyway.

“Take the Suburban,” he said at once. “Not the pickup. The Suburban’s got the good tires and it’s got weight.

“Stay off the section roads and take the blacktop all the way, and when you can’t see the road, follow the power poles. Don’t go over fifteen.”

“I know how to drive in snow, Norm.”

“I know you do,” he said. “I’m saying it so I feel better.”

He went out ahead of me and started the Suburban, because he had kept it plugged in since Monday and he wanted to listen to it run.

Then he got back on the tractor and started cutting a path down our driveway, so I would have something to come home to.

I threw two sleeping bags, the coffee can with the candle and matches, a shovel, and a thermos of hot cocoa into the back. Then I put Ava’s old booster seat back in the second row, where it had sat empty since October.

The drive into town is seven miles, five of them on blacktop. On a summer day it takes me nine minutes. That afternoon it took me fifty.

There were stretches where the whole world was white, the sky and the road and the ditches and the air between them, and the only thing I could see was the next power pole standing up out of it like a man waiting for a ride.

I drove from pole to pole. When I lost the poles, I stopped and waited until the wind took a breath and showed me the next one.

My phone rang about halfway there. I nearly did not pick up, but it was Dustin.

“Mom.” He was out of breath, like he had run. “Mrs. Kemp got me. I’m at a truck stop outside Glendive.

“They shut the interstate down at ten, so I’m parked with about two hundred other trucks. I told her yes. I told her yes, absolutely, and to put it in writing that I said it.”

“I’m on my way in now,” I said.

“Mom, where’s Britt?”

“At work. They can’t let her go. Marlene says the road’s closed.”

He was quiet. I could hear the truck stop behind him, the television and somebody laughing.

“I didn’t know about the card,” he said finally. “Kemp told me. I didn’t know until today. I swear I didn’t.”

“I know you didn’t, honey.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I watched the next pole come up out of the white. “Because you were in a truck in Wyoming,” I said. “And because it wasn’t yours to fix from there.”

He did not say anything for a long moment. Then he said, “Drive careful, Mom,” in the same voice he used when he was nine years old and I was driving him to the emergency room with a broken arm. I told him I would.

The office

The school sits on the north edge of town, and there was not a single car in the lot except Mrs. Kemp’s and the custodian’s.

I parked as close to the front doors as I could get and walked in with my scarf up over my nose.

All five of them were sitting on the bench in the office in their snow pants with their backpacks on their laps. Ava saw me first.

“Grandma!” She came off that bench and into my legs so hard I had to grab the counter. Hunter came right behind her, trying to look like a big boy who had not been worried at all, and failing in the corners of his mouth.

The Berg kids, Kaylee and Mason, stood up politely. They were nine and eleven, and they knew me from church and from the co-op, where their dad buys his feed.

Tyler Hanson was eight and the smallest of the bunch, and he was holding his backpack in front of him like a shield.

“Hi, Tyler,” I said. “Your mom says you’re coming home with me for a while. That okay with you?”

He nodded without saying anything. I decided he and I would get along fine.

Mrs. Kemp had a yellow legal pad on the counter. On it, in her neat secretary’s printing, were five lines.

Each one had a child’s name, a parent’s name, a time, and the words the parent had said. Beside Hunter and Ava, it said: Dustin Lund, father, 2:41 PM, “Yes, absolutely, put it in writing.”

She had me sign out each child on the sign-out sheet, the same as any other day. She checked that I had boosters for the two little ones.

She checked that I had a full tank. She looked out the window at the Suburban and then back at me.

“You call me when you get there,” she said. “I don’t care what time it is.”

“You’re staying here?”

“Somebody’s got to answer the phone,” she said. “Ed and I will sleep in the teacher’s lounge. We’ve done it before. Go on now, before it gets dark.”