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the storm out. So here I am,” she said,
lifting her hands off her lap, gesturing toward the truck. “Thank
you, by the way. How old is your daughter?”
    “Elizabeth was sixteen when she died twelve
years ago. She would be twenty-eight, about your age, I’m
guessing,” he said, looking back at his passenger.
    “I’m sorry, Joe. Yeah, I’m twenty-eight,”
she replied, her face flushed with the sinking feeling in her
stomach.
    “Car accident. By herself. They said she was
driving too fast,” he said before clearing his throat. “You’re
lucky I was driving past to pull someone else stuck on the side of
the road. I caught ya’ out of the corner of my eye. You couldn’t
have been in the ditch long; the tracks were still pretty fresh.
Does anyone know that you were in the ditch?”
    “Well…” she paused, looking out the
passenger window at the white haze. “I did leave a message with my
brother right before my phone shut off,” she lied.
    “Good. Once we get to the shop, you can call
your brother to come and get you later today. He should wait until
this blows over,” he replied, leaning forward over the steering
wheel to look out the windshield, as if he were able to calculate
the blizzard’s longevity and severity. Another connoisseur of
the weather. Nothing except white.
    “We’re just about there,” he added, shifting
his truck into third gear to get through a massive drift. She
hadn’t seen a snowplow for the last forty-five minutes.
    “I usually plow this road myself. It takes
too long for the county workers to get out here,” Joe said as he
turned into a driveway Delaney hadn’t even seen. A driveway that
leads to nowhere. As her fingers gripped her bag tighter, the
vague outline of a building began forming. He pulled the truck to a
stop. The dark gray metal buckled and wavered against the gusts of
wind and snow.
    “And here we are. Not much to the shop,
other than a phone, some cars, a vending machine and heat.”
    “That’s all I need. Are you headed back
out?” she asked.
    “You got it. I’ll be running in and out all
day. Snow is my gold,” he replied, tapping the steering wheel of
the tow truck. “Make yourself at home, dear.”
    “Thanks, Joe, good luck out there,” she said
as she heaved the door open against the force of the wind. She ran
in front of the truck’s headlights, giving Joe one last wave before
grabbing the handle of the black door stenciled with “Joe’s Towing
and Body Shop.” The door reluctantly swung open into a dimly-lit,
small waiting area that had a few chairs and the vending machine.
She shut the door behind her, kicking the snow out of the way in
order for the door to click shut and turned into the room, waiting
for her eyes to adjust to the darkness before going further into
it.
    The waiting area opened to a pair of
adjoined small offices to the right. She slid into a vinyl swivel
chair with its high back and massively structured arms behind a
metal desk amid the stacks of grease stained papers in the first
office. The vinyl, with tiny tears where white fuzz poked through,
squeaked against her jeans. She moved her body forward, but the
chair didn’t come with her. Her eyes traveled down to the bottom of
the chair – three wheels . In the place of the fourth wheel
was a wooden block. What are you doing with that gold, Joe? Get
a new chair. As well as a new phone.
    She picked up the chair by its arms to reach
the phone. The coils of the cord uncurled only the slightest bit as
she raised the receiver to her ear to silence. Her breath quickened
as her body shot up, frozen in place with the phone still at her
ear. Dead phone.
    Delaney set the receiver back down, looking
at the lights flickering in the waiting room. As she held her
breath, she tilted her head, listening to the quiet hum echoing
against the walls. Images of her Uncle Walt’s cottage in northern
Wisconsin amid flashes of lightning and torrents of rain flashed
through her mind. She felt