I went back up the bank. Brielle had the cable off the drum and the hook in her gloves. She did not look at anybody standing on the road. She walked down past me, careful, keeping the cable clear of her legs.
She got down on her knees in the snow at the front of his truck and set that hook on the frame. She checked the latch twice. Then she walked back up to the road and stood by the back tire of my wrecker with her hands up, so I could see her.
I worked the winch lever an inch at a time. The cable came tight. Merritt’s truck groaned and shifted and started to come back, the rear wheels settling down onto the snow, the nose lifting slowly out of the drift.
It took eight minutes. When his tires found the road, I eased off, set the winch brake, and walked down to unhook him.
Merritt got out of his truck. He stood on the road in his old canvas chore coat, and he did not look at anybody. He looked down at the ice between his boots.
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“Corinne,” he said.
“You’re out,” I said. “You’re fine. Drive slow going home.”
He shook his head. “That’s not what I’m trying to say to you.”
Before he could say it, Brielle walked up behind me.
She had my mother’s steel thermos in her hands. She had poured cocoa into the cup lid, and the steam came off it white in the cold, with the low sun shining through it gold.
She did not say anything. She just held it out to him.
Merritt looked at the cup. He looked at her. His face did something I had never seen it do, not at my mother’s birthday, not at their wedding, not at the funeral for his own brother. It came apart.
He took the cup in both hands. They were shaking so hard the cocoa rippled.
“Brielle,” he said, and his voice cracked right in the middle of her name. “I left you there.”
“I know, Grandpa,” she said.
“I left you in the cold. I looked right at you and I drove on.” He looked down at the cocoa. “My dad did that to me when I was sixteen. Left me in the ditch in a snowstorm and made me walk four miles home. I thought it made me tough. For fifty years I said it made me a man.”
He stopped. He drank a little of the cocoa, because I think he did not know what else to do with his hands or his face.
“It didn’t make me anything,” he said. “It just made me cold. And then I went and did it to you. I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry.”
Brielle stood there in her white jacket with the sun on her hair. She was seventeen. She had been crying in a ditch two hours before, and she had run the cable on four pulls since.
“It’s okay, Grandpa,” she said.
“No,” he said, the same way my mother had said it. “It isn’t okay. But thank you for saying it.”
She stepped forward and hugged him around the middle, the way she used to when she was little and he came in off the plow at the end of a storm smelling like diesel and cold air.
He held onto her with one arm and the cocoa with the other. Over her head, he looked at me, and his eyes were wet.