Every Car In The Ditch Pulled Out Free

“That’s it?” she said, looking at that one little hook.

“That’s it. Now go back up and guide the line while I take up the slack, so it comes straight onto the drum. The second it goes tight, you let go and step back.”

I worked the winch lever and the cable crept in across the snow. Brielle walked beside it with one gloved hand guiding it, keeping it out of the ruts. When it drew tight, she let go and went up to stand by my back tire, exactly where I had told her.

I worked the lever an inch at a time. The cable groaned on the drum. The little blue car shifted, then rocked, and then it began to come up the bank, nose first, pushing a small wave of snow ahead of it.

It came up out of that ditch like it was glad to see us. When the front wheels caught the edge of the road, I eased off, and the back wheels climbed up after them, and the whole car settled onto the shoulder with a little bounce.

Brielle let out a breath I think she had been holding for an hour. Then she laughed, the kind of laugh that is half crying, and she put both of her big gloved hands over her mouth.

We walked around the car together. No damage. A little snow in the wheel wells, a little slush on the floor mat. I knocked the snow out of the grille with my glove and unhooked the cable, and I handed her the tow eye to put back in the trunk.

“You’re done,” I said. “You can drive it home behind me, slow, or you can leave it here on the shoulder and ride with me, and we’ll come back for it later.”

She looked at the car. Then she looked up the road, the direction her grandpa had gone, and I knew what she was going to ask me before she asked it.

“Mom,” she said. “What are you going to do about Grandpa?”

I did not answer her right away, because I did not know. I stood on that road with the sun in my eyes and the cable reeled in, and I did not know what I was going to do.

I could drive to my mother’s house and stand in her kitchen and tell Merritt exactly what I thought of a man who would leave a seventeen-year-old girl alone in a ditch at four above zero. I had the whole speech ready to go.

But I knew how that speech would go. He would fold his arms. He would tell the story about his own father and the long walk home, and how kids today were soft. My mother would cry at the sink. And nothing at all would change.

Then I looked down the road, and about a quarter mile on, past the next curve, I saw a gray farm pickup sitting down in the ditch with its back wheels spinning and throwing snow into the sunshine.

“Get in the truck,” I told Brielle. “We’ll come back for your car.”

“Where are we going?” she asked me, already pulling the door open.

“To work,” I said.

The pickup belonged to Pius Jablonski. He farms the section across the road from my mom’s place, and he has sold Merritt hay for twenty years. He was fifty-nine and stubborn, and he had been trying to rock it out of there by himself for twenty minutes.