I pulled the wrecker past her car and backed it up on the road so the winch lined up straight with her front end. I left my amber lights flashing and set three orange cones behind the truck and one in front of it.
I put my orange hi-vis coat on over my sweatshirt and pulled my black beanie down over my ears. My black hair was in a bun that had been messy since six that morning. Then I climbed down the bank to her car.
She opened the door before I got there. Her face was red from crying and from trying not to cry, and she was sitting in just her hooded sweatshirt with her hands pulled up inside the sleeves.
“Where’s your coat?” I asked her.
“It’s on the back seat. I was warm when I left the house.”
I opened the back door, got out her white puffer jacket, and held it out to her the way I used to when she was five. She stood up in the snow and put her arms in it, and I zipped it all the way to her chin.
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“I wasn’t going fast,” she said again.
“I know you weren’t, honey. It’s glare ice under that snow. I’ve pulled six people out of ditches today, and I’d bet my truck none of them were going fast either.”
She looked at me. “Six?”
“Six since breakfast. You’re number seven. That’s what this road does in January. It isn’t your fault, and it isn’t something you need to be taught by sitting in the cold.”
She heard what I meant by that last part. I saw it go across her face. But she did not say anything about her grandpa, and neither did I. There would be time for that.
I walked around the car. She had gone in slow, which was good. The front bumper was packed with snow but not cracked, and nothing was hung up underneath on a culvert or a rock. It was a plain winch-out, the easiest kind there is.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re going to help me with this one.”
She blinked at me. “Mom, I don’t know how to do any of that.”
“You’re going to learn. Come on up to the truck with me.”
I showed her the winch controls on the side of the truck bed. I showed her the free-spool lever that lets the cable off the drum, and the heavy hook, and the big leather gloves I keep in the side box.
“You walk the cable down to the car,” I said. “Never step over it once it’s tight, and never stand where it could whip if it let go. When I say step back, you step way back, up on the road behind the truck.”
She put the gloves on, and they came halfway up her forearms. She took the hook, and she walked the cable down that bank with her tongue between her teeth, the way she used to do with her math homework at the kitchen table.
Most little cars like hers have a tow eye that screws into a hole in the front bumper, and the eye lives in the trunk next to the spare tire. I sent her back for it. She found it in its little foam tray and brought it to me like she had found gold.
I brushed the snow off the bumper cover, popped the little plastic flap, and threaded the eye in tight by hand. Then I showed her how to set the hook on it with the safety latch closed all the way.