The first rider she had rescued, the one who had collapsed in her parking lot and whispered about his brothers dying, was awake now. He sat in a corner with his head in his hands, his broad shoulders hunched, his frozen bandana finally off, revealing a face that was younger than she had expected and older than it should have been. He did not look up when she passed. He did not speak. He just sat there, holding his head, as if he were trying to hold himself together by force of will alone. Evelyn wanted to stop and ask him if he was all right, but she knew he was not all right, and she knew that asking would not make him so, and so she kept moving, kept working, kept her eyes on the door.
The fifth trip was a blur of white and noise and pain, and Evelyn remembered it afterward only in fragments: the truck sliding sideways on a patch of ice she could not see, her hands jerking the wheel back, the men in the bed shouting as they were thrown against the sides, her own voice answering them, steady somehow, telling them to hold on, telling them they were almost there, telling them things she was not sure were true but needed to be true. She remembered the way one man's hand had gripped the back of her seat, hard enough to leave marks, as if he were holding onto the truck itself, as if letting go would mean falling back into the storm. She remembered the way the diner's lights had looked when they finally appeared, small and flickering and impossibly welcome, like a lighthouse after a shipwreck.
The sixth trip was worse in a different way, because by then Evelyn knew the road too well, and knowing it did not make it easier. It made it worse, because she knew exactly where the worst curves were, exactly where the truck had slid before, exactly where the drop was closest, and anticipation joined fear as a passenger in the cab. She drove slower, if that was possible, fifteen miles an hour becoming ten, becoming a crawl, and every minute on the road felt like an hour, and every hour felt like a lifetime. The men she loaded on the sixth trip were the ones who had held on longest, and their endurance showed in their faces, in the way they tried to help each other into the truck even when they could barely stand themselves, in the way they checked on each other before they checked on themselves.
Back at the diner, the crowd had become a community, of a sort, in the hours since the first men had arrived. Men who had been strangers to each other in the morning, or at least strangers to Evelyn, were now sharing blankets, sharing coffee, sharing stories in low voices that rose and fell like a tide. One man, his ribs wrapped tight, was telling another man about a ride through Montana in summer, his voice slow and careful, as if the memory of warmth could lend itself to the present. Another man was singing, very quietly, a song Evelyn did not recognize, his voice rough and off-key, and nobody told him to stop. The diner, which had been empty for so long that Evelyn had begun to think of it as a tomb, was full of life again, noisy and crowded and smelling of things she had almost forgotten: coffee and leather and men talking and the particular, human smell of people who are alive because someone refused to let them die.
Evelyn moved through it all with her coffee pot, refilling mugs, checking faces, making sure no one slipped back into the gray pallor that meant danger. She found herself learning the diner again, the way it had been when Henry was alive and the place was full on a Saturday morning, the way the light fell across the booths, the way the counter caught the steam from the coffee, the way a room full of people could make a building feel less like a shell and more like a home. It hurt, in a way she had not expected, to feel that again, after so long of feeling nothing, and she had to turn away once, to the kitchen, to hide the tears that came without warning, because she did not want the men to see her cry, and because she was not sure she understood her own tears herself.
She checked on the man bleeding onto her floor, and found the bleeding had slowed, and she changed his bandages as best she could with what was left, and she told him he was going to be fine, and she hoped she was not lying. She checked on the man who had been throwing up in the bathroom, and found him asleep on the bathroom floor, his head pillowed on a folded towel, and she left him there, because sleep, even on a bathroom floor, was better than nothing. She checked on the man crying quietly in the corner, and found him awake now, talking to another man in a low voice, his tears dried, his face steadier, and she did not interrupt, because whatever comfort he had found, he had found it on his own, and that was worth more than anything she could have said.