As she sat helplessly moving back the way she’d come, like a passenger on a roller coaster in reverse, she looked up the highway to the west, hoping not to see headlights coming at her. The roads in this part of the state were long and straight, but they soared up and plunged down like curved ribbons of hard taffy.Ībby felt a wild hopeful moment of wondering if her truck could somehow manage to slide its way safely all the way back into town on the wrong side of the road. People thought Kansas was all flat, but it wasn’t, and especially not in the heart of the Flint Hills. And still the truck stayed on the pavement, hemmed in by snow, avoiding the shoulders, the deep culverts, the barbed wire fencing beyond. The skid went on and on, picking up speed as it backed into the crest of a rise, then dropped down again, taking the bottom of Abby’s stomach with it. A heavy drift of snow slowed it down and changed the direction of the slide, until it was going backward. With a shudder, the truck came out of the spin and started slid- ing sideways again, skidding in a long diagonal across the yellow line into the eastbound lane. She could still taste her last sip of it, along with the fruit and cereal she’d had for breakfast-all of which was now threatening to come back up her throat. Coffee sloshed out of her lidless thermal cup in its holder by her knee the smell of it filled the cab of her truck. She let her steering wheel alone, waiting for it to stop spinning before she touched it again. Ībby pumped her brakes with a light touch of her foot, didn’t slam on them like a fool, but her truck started to spin anyway, going round and round on the two-lane blacktop like a two-ton skater on ice. She was all by herself, in a bathrobe, for God’s sake, in a blizzard. What the hell was Nadine doing out there? It really was Nadine, a woman who was sixty-three years old and speeding toward early Alzheimer’s at about the same rate that Abby’s pickup truck was sliding sideways on Highway 177. My God! It was Nadine: the judge’s wife, Mitch’s mom, Abby’s own late mother’s lifelong friend. it was Nadine Newquist in a bathrobe, surrounded by swirling white, struggling through drifts on the old cemetery road, as if she were determined to visit a particular grave on this particular morning. It was not an impossible illusion sketched on the early morning air by the gusting snow. When the wind blew an opening in the blizzard, Abby realized that it was not a hallucination. That can’t be, she thought, as she squinted into the snow, trying to see more clearly. Abby Reynolds braked her truck on the icy highway, startled by what she imagined she saw off to the side of the road.
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