Every Car In The Ditch Pulled Out Free

“I didn’t know he said that to her. I didn’t know that, Corinne. I would have come myself if I’d known.”

“I know you would have, Mom. I know.”

“I told him he should have stopped either way. He went out to the shop and he’s been out there ever since. Then about twenty minutes ago he got in his truck and left. He didn’t say where.”

I looked out the windshield at the road shining in the sun.

“He’ll be all right,” I said, though I did not know that.

“Is it true you’re pulling everybody out for free?” she asked me.

“News travels,” I said.

“Pius told his wife, and she told the whole prayer chain.” She was quiet again. “Corinne, honey, what are you doing out there?”

I thought about how to answer her. I did not want to say it was to shame him, because it was not that, not all the way. I did not want to call it charity, either, because that was not it at all.

“I’m doing what you’re supposed to do on a day like this,” I said. “Somebody’s in the ditch, you stop.”

My mother did not say anything for a long time. Then I heard her start to cry, real quiet.

“I’m going to make cocoa,” she said. “I’ll bring it out to you. Where are you?”

“Dairy road,” I told her. “By the creek. Drive slow, Mom.”

She came out at half past two in her old green car, driving slower than I have ever seen anybody drive in my life, with a big steel thermos on the seat beside her and a box of the bars she makes for funeral lunches.

She hugged Brielle a long time on the side of that road. She held her face in both her hands and looked at her the way you look at a baby you just got back, checking every part of her.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m so sorry he did that to you.”

“It’s okay, Grandma,” Brielle said.

“No,” my mother said. “It isn’t okay. But you’re okay, and that’s what I care about right now.”

She gave Brielle the thermos and told her to keep it in the truck for anybody who got cold. Then she said a short prayer right there in the road, with one hand on my arm and one on Brielle’s, the way she used to over Sunday dinner.

She did not ask God to fix Merritt or to punish him. She just asked Him to keep everybody on that road safe until the sun went down.

Then she got back in her car and drove home at fifteen miles an hour.

At five minutes to three, Pius called my cell. He had been driving the road all afternoon checking on folks, and I think by then he felt like part of the crew.

“Corinne,” he said. “You’d better come out to the curve by the old schoolhouse.”

“Somebody stuck out there?”

There was a pause on the line, long enough that I knew before he said it.

“It’s Merritt,” he said.

I looked over at Brielle. She had heard. She was sitting very still in the passenger seat with my mother’s thermos in her lap, both hands around it.

“Is he hurt?” I asked.

“No. He’s fine. He’s nose-down in the ditch with his back wheels clear up off the ground, but he’s not hurt. He was coming this way. I think he was coming out to find you.”