The fifth car passed. The sixth.
Her hands were not warming up. That was the first thing that truly frightened her — not the wind, not the cold, but the simple, mechanical fact that her hands were not warming up. She pulled them out and looked at them. They were the color of candle wax, the fingers slightly swollen, and when she pressed her thumb into the back of her hand, the white mark stayed. She tried to make a fist. Two of the fingers on her right hand would not bend all the way.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
She thought about her phone. The Nokia, in her coat pocket, its battery at forty-three percent when she left the house. She could call someone. She could call Nora — ninety miles away in Columbus, Mark at work, the children at school — and Nora would drive up, three hours round trip, and Evelyn would become the problem she had spent three months refusing to become. She could call Margaret, next door, who had stopped asking her for coffee. She could call Pastor Cho. The phone was in her pocket. All she had to do was reach for it.
She did not reach for it.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
The shame came up in her then, the way it had come up in the Target parking lot — hot and sudden, out of place in the cold. She had not told anyone about the fall. Not Nora. Not Benjamin. Not Margaret. Eleven minutes and forty-three seconds on the asphalt, twenty-three people, and she had carried it home like a stolen thing and hidden it. The wrist had never healed right. It ached in the cold — ached now, dully, under the greater ache of the frost — and sometimes, when she lifted the milk or turned a doorknob, it gave a small, sickening click, and she would stop and stand still until the nausea passed.
And the money. Four thousand two hundred dollars in savings, and the county tax notice on the kitchen table, and the car that clicked when she turned the key. She had done the arithmetic a hundred times, lying awake at three in the morning, the numbers glowing in the dark behind her eyes. The taxes. The car. The groceries. If the car needed a new battery — and it did, she knew it did, the clicking had told her for three weeks — that was money. If the wrist needed a doctor — and it did, she knew it did — that was money. Every problem had a price, and every price came out of the same four thousand two hundred dollars, and the taxes were not negotiable.
Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.
She was sixty years old. She had raised two children. She had buried a husband. She had lived in the same town for thirty-two years, and she was sitting in a bus shelter with wax-white hands, counting cars, because she had been too proud to call a tow truck and too proud to ask her daughter for a ride and too proud, eleven weeks ago, to tell a single soul that she had fallen in a parking lot and no one had stopped.
The pride had a shape now. She could see it. It had the shape of a spine, and it had held her up for sixty years, and it was going to kill her.
Sixteen. Seventeen.
And then, because the cold does strange things to the mind, she thought about Robert. Not the Robert of the photograph on the mantel — the sunburned, smiling Robert of Michigan in 2008 — but a younger Robert, the Robert of 1998, driving home from a job site in the rain. She had never known this story. No one had ever told her. But it had happened, on a summer evening twenty-six years ago, on I-70, and it was the truest thing about him she had never learned.
The rain had been coming down in sheets, the kind of rain that turns the interstate into a river of red taillights. Robert had been driving the old work van, tired, wanting home, when he saw the motorcycle pulled onto the shoulder, its rider standing beside it in a soaked denim vest, twenty-one years old and trying to look like the rain didn't bother him. James Malone. A kid, really, with a busted chain and no tools and no money and nowhere to be. Robert had pulled over — no hesitation, the way he did everything — and spent forty minutes in the rain helping the kid fix the bike, his good shirt ruined, his hands black with grease. He had given the boy his thermos of coffee. When the kid tried to pay him, Robert had waved him off.
Nobody's invisible if somebody stops, he had said, and meant it the way he meant everything, simply, the way other men meant the weather.
Evelyn had never known. Robert had come home late that night, soaked through, and told her the van had trouble, and she had believed him, and he had never mentioned the boy on the motorcycle. It had not seemed worth mentioning to him. It was just a thing you did.
Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.
The cars kept coming. Evelyn's counting had become automatic, the way breathing is automatic, a thing the mind does to keep itself occupied while the body shuts down. She understood, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was counting for the same reason she had counted in the Target parking lot. Not to keep track of the cars. To keep track of herself. As long as she was counting, she was still here.
Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.
The cold had moved past her hands and feet now. It was in her legs, a deep, spreading heaviness, and in her chest, a tightness that made each breath shallow. Her thoughts were coming slower. She thought about the candy dish by the front door, the cellophane-wrapped candies, and whether anyone would ever take one again. She thought about the birthday cards, the cursive, the three days early. She thought about Lily and Sam, nine and seven, and whether they would remember her voice.
Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.