The Pickup List and the Blizzard

The plow

At about ten fifteen, Norm said, “Lights.”

The county plow came up the blacktop with its amber lights turning, throwing snow twenty feet into the ditch. Behind it, close as they dared, came two pickups.

Mark Berg climbed out of the first one in his lineman’s bibs and hard-hat liner, still wearing his climbing belt. He had been on a broken pole north of town since noon.

Behind him came Tyler’s mother, Jenny Hanson, still in her scrubs under a parka, in her husband’s pickup with her husband driving. They had followed the plow out from town on the blacktop, because it was the first road the county got open.

They came in the kitchen door with the cold coming off them. They stood there and looked through the doorway into the living room, at the row of quilts and the five kids under them. Jenny put both hands over her mouth.

“We’ll get out of your hair,” Mark said quietly. “We’ll just carry them out to the trucks.”

“You will not,” Norm said. “The plow’s already turned around. The road will drift in behind him in twenty minutes and you know it. Sit down and have some chili.”

They argued for about one minute. Then Mark looked out the window, where he could no longer see the plow lights, and he sat down.

So that is how there came to be two extra pickups in my yard and two other families at my kitchen table at eleven o’clock at night.

Mark’s wife, Shelly, called from the bank, where she was spending the night on the break room couch, and Mark handed me the phone. She cried and thanked me. I told her that her daughter had a beautiful singing voice.

Midnight

Brittany came at eleven fifty-two. I know the time because I was looking at the clock on the stove when Norm said, “Somebody else.”

Her little car came up the driveway behind the second plow pass, sliding a little, with the headlights pointed every which way. She had driven forty miles on a road that had been closed most of the day and had opened only an hour before.

I learned later that she had worked a double shift, since the night girls could not get in, and had not seen her phone until after nine.

She did not knock. She came straight through the kitchen door with snow to her knees and her hair wet and her scrub top showing under her coat. She was looking past all of us, toward the living room.

She saw the quilts. She saw Hunter flat on his back with his mouth open and one arm thrown over Tyler. She saw Kaylee’s library book on the floor where it had fallen.

Then she saw me, sitting on the floor against the couch where I had been for more than two hours, and Ava’s hand still holding mine.

Brittany stopped right there in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She just stopped. And everybody in my kitchen, Mark and Jenny and Jenny’s husband and Norm, went quiet.

She took her boots off. She did it slowly, one and then the other, the way you do when you need something to do with your hands.

Then she came across the room in her wet socks and knelt down on the floor next to her daughter and put her hand on Ava’s hair.

Ava did not wake up. She just held on to my hand a little tighter.

Brittany looked at that. She looked at it for a long time. And then she put her face down in my mother’s wedding ring quilt and cried without making a sound.