Every Car In The Ditch Pulled Out Free

Then I thought about Brielle sitting alone in a cold car in a ditch, and I knew that none of those words would warm her up one degree. Yelling at Merritt would not get my daughter out of the snow. My truck would.

“Brielle, listen to me,” I said. “Get out real careful on the high side and look at your tailpipe. If there’s snow packed around it, kick it clear. Then get back in and crack your window an inch. Can you do that for me?”

“Why?” she asked, and I could hear she was scared of the answer.

“Because if snow blocks that pipe, the fumes come back into the car. I’ve pulled people out who got sleepy in there and didn’t know why. Go check it. I’ll stay right here on the phone with you.”

I listened to her door open and the crunch of her boots in the snow, and then I heard her say, “It’s clear, Mom. It’s okay.” The door shut again and she was breathing hard from the climb.

“Good girl. Now stay in the car with your phone and your hazards on. I’m dropping this van and I’m coming. Twenty-five minutes. Maybe less if the road lets me.”

“Mom?” she said.

“Yeah, honey. I’m right here.”

“Are you going to be mad at Grandpa?”

I looked at the sun on the snow for a second before I answered her, because I wanted to tell her the truth and I did not know yet what it was.

“I’m coming to get you,” I said. “That’s the only thing I’m doing right now.”

I dropped the minivan at the body shop and unhooked it faster than I ever have, and I turned back out of town with my amber lights going. My wrecker is a red one-ton with a wheel lift and a winch on the back, fourteen years old, and it runs like a watch.

I have run it on my own for twelve years. Brielle’s father left when she was three. He lives out in Montana now and sends a card at Christmas when he remembers. The truck and I raised her together, more or less.

The county road runs north out of town about nine miles before it bends along the lake. It had been plowed, but the plow had packed the snow down hard over a layer of glare ice, and the sun had polished the top of it until it looked wet.

I passed a farm pickup nose-down in a drift on the way out, and an empty sedan sitting at an angle in the snow with nobody in it. I made a note of both of them in my head and kept on going.

Then I came over the hill past the Jablonski place, and there she was, right where she said she would be.

The little blue sedan sat down in the ditch on the right side, tilted toward the field, with snow halfway up the doors. The exhaust puffed white in the cold. Brielle’s long brown hair was the first thing I saw through the back window.

It was a beautiful day, if you can believe it. The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg without a cloud anywhere, and those fields ran flat and white clear out to the edge of the world. It was four degrees above zero.