Page 13

It’s only at the slow passing of a security vehicle flashing its lights that we break off—just as awkwardly, I might add, as we began.

“Well, great,” I say. “Check the snow da-song off our list. Let’s go.”

James scoots into the passenger’s seat of the truck, looking extremely cautious of the amount of open grease all around us, and I tuck in and shut the door. It takes a thorough slamming to get it to shut all the way, which of course I know and he doesn’t, and as the rattle of heavy steel settles in our bones, he looks at me even more warily.

“What?” I say.

“I’ve just realized. I’m trapped.”

I can’t help it. I laugh. “Right. Because I’m going to kidnap you.”

He eyes me warily again, as though that could be a very real possibility.

I wiggle my fingers at him. “Or maybe worse. Maybe I’ll make you sing another song with me.”

A pencil-straight line draws over his lips. “You wouldn’t.”

There’s just enough mirth in his eyes that the immediate pinch in my chest—the pinch that tells me joking like this might offend him, and offending him is bad, and if that is bad, then how stupid of me to talk—eases.

I smile as I put the key in the ignition. “I might.”

I smell a whiff of the cab around me as I turn the key and then inhale a deeper breath. It’s like I’ve grabbed Daddy by his big Carhartt jacket and nestled my whole self in his embrace. The scent of grease and old cloth seats and stale gas station coffee fills my lungs, and I feel a lift of hope for the first time in weeks. Months, maybe. Who knows? Could be years.

Home.

I didn’t realize I was so homesick after all.

“So,” I say, turning with some effort the extra-large steering wheel as I pull us out of the parking spot. “Where are we headin’?”

Good grief. Ten seconds into the mountains and I’m turning back into a hillbilly taxicab driver before my very eyes. I won’t go down that easily.

“Ingggg,” I say, adding a thorough g. I clear my throat. Smile politely as I glance his way. Try to look polished. “Heading.”

There’s a tiny knit in his brow as his gaze drifts from the phone he’s pulling out of his pocket to my face.

“The Carriage Inn, and I’ve got the address right here. Your roots are getting you already, huh?”

I straighten (partly because I can’t see the road otherwise, and partly out of indignance) and say in the clearest, most personality-less tone you’ve ever heard an American speak, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“I’m talking about how you, respectfully, sound like a robot right now.”

“I do not sound like a robot.”

Okay, I heard it that time.

He shrugs. Looks out the window as I make a left.

We head down a little strip of highway with nothing but snow and farmland on each side of us.

“I like small towns,” he muses, more to himself than to me. “They’re peaceful.”

I smile because peaceful is a relative term. “Watch the parents of three-year-olds cheering on their kids as they chase slicked-up pigs at the county fair and get back to me,” I say, cringing at the memory. “Where’d you fly in from?”

“New York. You?”

“Seattle.”

There’s a slight bump in the road and he adjusts in his seat uncomfortably. We are rolling a mere forty-five along a deserted fifty-five-miles-an-hour highway, but I can’t help noticing how he’s tapping his foot against the floorboard like he’s trying to hit an imaginary brake. Like I’m a student driver again and he’s my mother.