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the wheel.
    “I could push,” he offered.
    “It needs to like come out sideways, not forward.”
    “We could use that huge winch you’ve got on the back. Tie it
to a tree or something.”
    “What, and then reel it in like a fish?”
    “OK, bad idea. What do you have that thing for anyway?”
    “Oh, I went through a WWSD phase last winter. What Would Superman Do. Like a Good
Samaritan thing. My specialty was towing people out of ditches and snow banks
and stuff.”
    “Did you ever?”
    “A couple.”
    “And now you’re stuck yourself. How ironic.” He breathed
into his gloves and pulled them on—I’d turned off the car to keep the
exhaust from backing up and killing us, and it was cold inside already. “Got a
shovel?”
    “Nope.”
    “We could knock on one of these houses and borrow one.”
    “...”
    When I didn’t respond he added, “OK, then we push.”

 
    Blazingly lit by the headlights of my Jeep, with
snowflakes twinkling down around him, he looked like a dream, a figment of my
imagination. This was too real to be a dream, but too surreal to actually be
happening. Griff, who I hadn’t talked to in two years or really in four, was
standing up to his thighs in a snowy backstreet in Harwich, trying to push me
out of a snow bank. He must’ve been an apparition, the Ghost of Christmas Past.
    At his command I floored the Jeep in reverse. It came
unstuck easily, much easier than either of us expected, and as the front bumper
whisked out from under his hands he fell forward into the snow. He reappeared
in my headlights a moment later with snow on his chin, laughing.
    I got out and stood around while he smacked snow off his
clothes, then we got back in the Jeep.
    “That was something,” I said.
    “That was something.”
    “Maybe we should cut our losses and head back?”
    “We can’t just go home after that! It won’t have been worth
the trouble. Drive me somewhere. Show me your life or something.”
    “My life?”
    “Give me a tour. Just watch out for plows.”

 
    The comic shop was on the first floor of a two-story
building. Its upstairs neighbor was a family dentist. Bloody-mouthed boys let
loose on the action figures by their moms as a reward for good behavior were
big customers at Golden Age Comics. (Simon, the owner, was a collector/historian
and had named his store after the oldest and most valuable books.) Beside
Golden Age on the first floor was a Copy Cop, and above that the offices of a
small law firm. Light from a floodlight shined down from the eaves of the
building but all the windows in all the businesses were dark. The sidewalk looked
like it’d been shoveled about halfway into the storm. We trampled through the
snow and up the three buried concrete steps.
    “I’m excited,” Griff said.
    I was too. It was like we were archaeologists, discovering
this place.
    I wiped the gauze of snow from the sign hanging beside the
glass door. The O in Golden Age,
yellow, was shaped like a word balloon, its point jutting off the sign and away
from the other black letters in a 3D effect. The tip of the point had once
pricked the finger of a nine-year-old customer, Sleeping Beauty –style. Now it was blunted with duct tape.
    I unlocked the two locks, pushed open the door. The bell
above the door jingled.
    “Hold on a sec,” I said.
    I flipped on the fluorescent lights— tink tink tink . On the wall beside the
counter where the register sat was a glowing keypad. I mumbled the numbers as I
punched the keys. The alarm chirped and released its grip on the store.
    “I like this,” Griff said, smiling. His hands clasped behind
his back, he browsed around with the quiet intrigue of a person touring an
ancient tomb.
    It was a cozy store with bright yellow walls that on sunny
days seemed to glow, and that made the superhero costumes in the comics and
posters against them even more vibrant. It wasn’t like all the other comics
shops I’d ever been in, most of which were dark and