He climbed out when he saw my lights. His face was red and his cap was crooked, and he was breathing hard from shoveling at his back tires with a scoop that was not made for it.
“Corinne,” he said. “I was about to call you. I figured you’d be swamped today with all this ice.”
“I am,” I said. “Let’s get you out anyway.”
Brielle ran the cable without me telling her twice. She went down the bank with that big hook in her gloves and set it on the frame hook at the front of his truck, and she checked the latch twice, just like I had shown her.
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Pius watched her do it. Then he looked at me, and he raised his eyebrows up under the bill of his cap.
“She’s helping today,” I said, and that was all I said.
It took a little longer with his truck. He had dug himself in deep, and he was heavy. I had Brielle stand way back on the road, and I brought him up slow, and when his front tires bit on the road he gave me a thumbs up through the windshield.
He got out and came over with his wallet already in his hand. “What do I owe you? It’s a hundred and fifty, isn’t it?”
On a normal day it is a hundred and fifty. That is what a winch-out runs in our county, a little more after dark or on a holiday. It is fair money for the risk and the fuel and the wear on the truck, and I have never been ashamed to charge it.
“Nothing today,” I said.
He looked at me funny. “Come again?”
“It’s free on this road today,” I told him.
He looked at me for a long minute. Then he looked over at Brielle, who was coiling the cable back onto the drum like she had been doing it for years, and something in his face changed.
He put his wallet back inside his coat. He did not ask again.
“There’s a minivan down by the lake bend,” he said quietly. “Lady with kids in it. And there’s a boy stuck out on the dairy road, and I think somebody went out to help him.”
“Then that’s where we’re going,” I said.
I want to tell you about the rest of that afternoon, because it was one of the best days I have ever had in that truck, and I have had that truck for fourteen years.
The minivan by the lake bend belonged to a schoolteacher from town named Annika. She taught second grade, and she had two of her own little ones in car seats in the back, and she had been sitting there forty-five minutes trying to get anybody on the phone.
“Everybody’s backed up three hours,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. The kids are starting to get cold.”
“Well, we’re here now,” I said. “Keep that engine running and your heat on, and check your tailpipe for me.”
Brielle went down to her window and talked to those two little ones while I set up. She told them a story about a snowman who wanted to go to Florida, of all things, and they were laughing by the time she came back up the bank for the cable.