He remembered that there were hills around Hysham, and he hoped that they were getting close as they went up again, but then fear clutched at him as the tires slipped and Jack pumped the brakes with slow and steady intent.
“You know how to drive in bad weather, I see,” Morgan said, doing his best to make conversation even as his knuckles ached with tension around the handle of his cane.
“We got some bad storms in Lawndale,” Jack said. “Nothing like this, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Jack sighed gently, his chest rising and falling as he readjusted his fingers around the steering wheel. “Back east, the winters are harsh. My dad made us learn to drive in all weather, in case the delivery truck couldn’t make it.” He looked at Morgan, a flick of those eyes, and then back at the road again. “People live in neighborhoods and can walk to the store, butdelivery trucks came from all over. Sometimes they got stuck. We’d meet them halfway in the store’s truck.”
“It’s different out here,” Morgan said, glad to be distracted from the horrible weather by interesting facts about Jack’s life.
They had time now for the other questions he wanted to ask.Tell me about those girls you sometimes dated. And the boys.
But he couldn’t be a distraction when Jack had to concentrate hard on the road, so he did his bit by holding on to the armrest as a way of keeping them in one piece. Magical thinking, for sure.
“It’s bigger,” Jack agreed. “Much, much bigger. Star always said?—”
He stopped, and Morgan took his eyes off the road for a second. “Go on, what did Star say?”
He wanted to ask more about Star, and about Blue, but the wind whomped the truck and it slid to the right, to the unseen edge of the highway, like it wanted to spin out, and Morgan had to grab on extra hard to keep them safe.
“Don’t remember,” Jack said, his voice strained as he did his best to keep the truck going steady and slow, back into what they could see of the lane. “Don’t fuckin’ remember.”
His face was white, and his knuckles beneath the gloves would be white, as well. All of him was tense, and Morgan was tense in sympathy. They could not stop. There was only the going, on and on through the endless tunnel of gray-white snow.
Morgan lost track of where they were and how far they’d come. This was his fault. If he’d been more sensible, they could be cozy in a motel room, and never mind his own damn feelings about a situation like that. The day was getting darker, and everything felt thick and slow and cold. Like inevitable death.
Morgan’s phone rang. He pulled it out of his coat pocket, fumbling before he could find the button to answer.
“Hello?” he asked, unable to imagine a single person who would be calling him at that moment.
“This is Mabel,” a familiar voice said. “Ambrose said he saw Jack driving you toward the highway earlier. Where were you making him take you, with another blizzard coming on?”
“Mabel?” he asked, blinking at the wall of snow in front of them. “We went to Billings to return a book Oralee had borrowed.” He didn’t want to tell her about buying clothes for Jack, because her stinging words about his lack of care still rankled.
“Where are younow?” she asked, a familiar snap in her voice.
“We’re on the highway, and?—”
“On thehighway? What are you doing on the highway in this weather?” There was a pause. “What mile marker are you at? Have you passed the Big Horn rest stop?”
“I don’t know, Mabel.” He scowled at the phone. “I can’t see the road signs because of the snow.”
“Check your map app, young man,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
Morgan put her on speaker and opened the app on his phone. He should have been doing this all along so he could tell Jack where they were and how much longer it would be until their exit.
Using his fingers, he adjusted the view until he could see that they needed exit 67. According to the app, their little blue dot was ten miles away from the exit, and the indicator said it would take them, at their speed, half an hour to get there. He relayed that information to Mabel.
“I’ll call you right back,” she said and hung up.
Morgan looked at Jack.
“At this speed, we need to exit in half an hour.” Which Jack had presumably heard him say a few seconds earlier, of course.
Morgan looked at the cloud of white they were driving into. Only one set of red dots was visible ahead of them. He hoped there weren’t any more 18-wheelers racing up from behind.
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to see the exit,” Jack said.
