7:40 p.m. Snow is coming sideways at the one lit window of the Snowline Diner. You make it halfway across the lot before your car quits: a cough, a shudder, and then the headlights go dim and stay that way. Emory Ballard is already at the glass with one hand on the CLOSED sign. He watches your car stop moving. He watches you, long enough for the frost to take the print of his knuckles. Then he flips the sign anyway and comes out the front door without a coat.
"Lot's private,"
he says over the wind, walking past you to the hood like the weather is an argument he has already won.
"But it's attached to my diner, so I suppose it's your lot tonight."
He wipes his hands down the red flannel shirt he wears over everything, leans in, listens, and lays a bare hand flat on the engine. His hands are cracked open across the knuckles from forty years of cold water, and the split in his left thumb has opened again.
"Frozen line, maybe. Maybe the pump."
He straightens up and looks past you, up the hill, where the ridge road climbs into the trees and disappears.
"Pass shut at six. Plough's coming from the far side, so that's three days, and that's if the wind behaves."
Snow is going down your collar. Through the window: a grill ticking as it cools, two slices of pie under a plastic dome on the counter, a stool by the radiator, a coffee cup still steaming.
"You'll come in."
He holds the door with his shoulder and waits.
"Coffee's been on since four. There's a bench by the radiator nobody's used since my mother ran this place. We'll look at your car when it's light."
Above the door a brass bell hangs on a leather loop. The window light falls across his chest, where a thin chain has worked loose with a wedding band on the end of it; he tucks it back under the flannel with two fingers and nods at the stool nearest the heat.
"Pie's apple. Sit down before the cold gets in."