The drive back took twice as long as the drive out, and every minute of it felt like an hour. The men in the truck bed were exposed to the wind, and there was nothing she could do about it, no cab big enough, no cover she could rig while driving, and the knowledge of it sat in her stomach like a stone. She drove with her hands locked on the wheel, her eyes fixed on the white nothing ahead, following the memory of the road rather than any sign of it, because there were no signs left. The snow had buried everything. Twice the truck slid sideways and she fought it back with her whole body, her arms aching, her heart lurching. Once the back end fishtailed so badly that she felt the rear wheels lose the road entirely, and for a terrible second she thought they were going over the edge, all of them, into the dark below. She did not stop. She could not stop.
In the cab, one of the men kept saying "Thank you" over and over, a hoarse whisper, as if the words were the only warm thing he had left. Another man, his voice rougher, told him to shut up, not unkindly, just tiredly, as if even gratitude cost energy they could not spare. The radio played static and trucker gospel, thin and far away. The windshield wipers screamed against the glass. Evelyn's vision blurred at the edges, and the pain in her chest spread in waves, and she gripped the wheel harder and thought about Danny, about Henry, about the pills sitting on her kitchen counter back at the diner, and she kept driving.
When the diner finally appeared through the snow, its dying neon flickering its seven-second heartbeat, Evelyn nearly wept with relief. She got the men inside somehow, half-carrying, half-dragging, and they collapsed into booths and onto the floor, shaking violently, their skin the color of corpses, their breath rattling. She turned every burner on the stove to high, filled pots with water, grabbed every blanket from the storage room, and draped them over shaking shoulders and trembling legs. The diner smelled at once of wet leather and burned coffee and propane heat and cold, frightened men. Inside, the work was slower and more intimate than the drive, and in some ways harder. The men could not undress themselves properly, their fingers too stiff to work zippers and buttons, and Evelyn helped where she could, peeling back frozen layers with hands that were themselves shaking, trying not to think about how close to the bone the cold had gotten. One man had ice in his beard so thick it had to be melted away with warm towels before she could even see his mouth. Another man's hands were so swollen that his rings, if he had worn any, would have cut into his skin, and she wrapped them gently, layer by layer, the way she had once wrapped Danny's hands when he was small and had come in from the snow with his fingers white and aching. The memory stopped her for a moment, sharp and unexpected, and she stood with a towel in her hands, breathing hard, until the man in front of her coughed and brought her back.
She checked on each of them in turn, going from booth to booth, from man to man, asking questions she already knew the answers to: Can you feel your toes? Can you move your fingers? Does it hurt when you breathe? Some of them answered. Some of them only nodded or shook their heads. One man, the one who had said thank you over and over in the cab, grabbed her hand as she passed and held it for a moment, his grip weak but warm, warmer than it had been an hour ago, and he looked up at her with eyes that were finally beginning to focus. "You came back," he said, as if he still could not quite believe it. "I told them you would," Evelyn said, though she had told no one any such thing, and she squeezed his hand once before moving on, because there were other hands to hold and other faces to check, and because staying too long with any one man would mean neglecting the rest.
The diner itself seemed to be waking up around them, the way a house wakes when people finally come home to it. The burners hissed, the pots steamed, the coffee pot gurgled, and the smell of warmth began to push back against the smell of cold and wet leather. Evelyn filled mug after mug and set them in front of shaking hands, and she watched men who had been silent all night begin to talk, quietly at first, in short, broken sentences, about the storm, about the road, about how the engines had died one by one and how they had huddled together and waited. She let them talk, because talking meant they were alive.
When the first load was settled as best as she could settle them, when the blankets were distributed and the coffee was poured and the worst of the shaking had begun to ease, Evelyn stood in the middle of her diner and took stock. Five men safe, or safer than they had been. Forty-four still out there, by her count, plus the president, waiting in the dark for a truck that had already made one impossible trip and would have to make more. The numbers were daunting, and her body was already protesting, her chest aching, her legs trembling, her vision blurring at the edges whenever she moved too quickly. She knew that if she sat down, she might not get up again that night.