She looked at them, at the first load, at the men she had pulled out of the storm, and then she looked at the door, and at the storm beyond it, and she did not sit down. She went back outside.
The second trip was worse. The road, if it could still be called a road, had disappeared entirely under fresh snow, and Evelyn drove by prayer and by the shape of the land she had known for twenty years, by the curve of the cliff on her right and the drop she could feel rather than see on her left. The truck's heater, which had barely worked on the first trip, now gave up even pretending, blowing cold air that smelled faintly of rust, and her fingers went numb inside her gloves. She talked to herself as she drove, out loud, because the sound of her own voice was the only thing keeping her awake. She talked about the diner, about the coffee she would make when she got back, about the blankets still in the storage room, about anything except the pain in her chest, which was spreading now in a slow, relentless tide.
The third trip nearly killed her. She knew it even as she was living it, knew it in the way her vision narrowed to a tunnel and her hands went clumsy on the wheel and her heart stumbled in a rhythm that frightened her more than the cliff ever had. She loaded the worst-off men she could find, men whose skin was gray and whose eyes were unfocused, and she drove back with the truck sliding and the wind screaming and her own breath coming in short, ragged gasps. By the time she got them inside, her legs would barely hold her, and she had to lean against the counter, gripping the edge until her knuckles went white.
She did not rest. There were still men out there. She filled pots with water and set them on the burners, threw blankets over the new arrivals, checked on the men from the earlier trips, and then she went back out into the storm for the fourth time, because there was no one else to go, and because stopping would mean admitting that she had reached the end of what her body could do, and she was not ready to admit that yet.
Halfway through the fourth trip, her vision grayed out completely. It did not fade or blur. It simply went, as if someone had turned off a light behind her eyes, and for a terrible, endless moment she was driving blind through a blizzard on a mountain road with a cliff on one side and a drop on the other, and she knew, with a clarity that cut through everything else, that she was going to die right here. She took her foot off the gas and let the truck slow, and then she pulled over, as far from the edge as she dared, and sat there in the running truck while her heart tried to punch through her sternum.
The pills were back at the diner. She had already taken too many that day, five of them, swallowed with cold coffee in the small hours, and she knew what the doctor in Casper would say about taking more. Taking more might kill her. Not taking them would definitely kill her. She sat in the truck with her hands on the wheel and her eyes closed and her heart hammering, and she thought about Danny, about the six hours nobody could reach him, about Henry behind the counter with the coffee pot still warm in his hand, about the men in the truck bed behind her who were depending on a sixty-four-year-old woman with a failing heart to get them down a mountain. She waited until her vision came back in patches, gray and then white and then the shape of the road again, and then she put the truck in gear and kept driving.
The second trip taught her what the first had only hinted at: that the mountain did not want to let her pass a second time. The snow was deeper, the wind was sharper, and the truck, which had complained on the first trip, now protested at every turn, its engine coughing, its tires spinning, its wipers leaving arcs of ice across the glass faster than she could clear them. She loaded the next worst-off men, men whose lips were blue and whose hands were too stiff to hold the truck bed, and she drove back with a locked grip on the wheel, repeating a wordless prayer: just keep going.
Between trips, she worked in the diner with a kind of frantic efficiency, moving from man to man, from pot to pot, from blanket to blanket, never sitting, never pausing long enough to feel how tired she was. She learned their names in fragments, the way you learn names in a crisis, not all at once but in pieces: a man called Wrench, who kept trying to help even though his own hands were useless; a man called Bones, who was so thin beneath his layers that Evelyn wondered how he had survived the night at all; a man who did not give a name, only a nod, when she asked. She wrote none of it down. There was no time to write. There was only time to warm, to feed, to cover, and to go again.