“I’m Alice,” the woman said. “We were going to see our daughter. Maybe our daughter can get together with your mother.” She laughed. “I think your mother’d be disappointed if she got our daughter instead of you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Gina said.

“You don’t know our daughter.”

“Now,” the woman’s husband said.

Chase came back to the table. “Can’t get through,” he said. “That line is all people trying the phone and finding out they can’t get through. But they don’t tell each other it doesn’t work. Or if they do, everyone still wants to try it.” He shook his head and sat down.

Gina stood. “I’m going for a hot chocolate,” she said. “What can I get you?”

They all asked for coffee and Gina stepped over two children in snowsuits playing on the slushy floor. The waitress at the counter seemed too nice and too old to be a waitress, and Gina talked to her about the snow. When the coffees were ready, Gina felt the truck driver looking at her, and she carried the tray to the table, avoiding his eyes. She thought again of the couple in the car, braking in the road, unable to keep moving forward in the blinding snow. She wondered how soon they had noticed it coming, if they had seen the lights first or heard the shrieking brakes, and who noticed it first, and what they said.

“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” Alice asked, nodding at the cup of chocolate. “You seem like a coffee drinker. And you’ve got the morning-sickness eyes.”

“It’s that bad, huh?” Gina said.

“Our Shelley’s pregnant,” Alice said, and she looked at Al as if daring him to say something. “She looks like she got punched in both eyes, too.”

“Congratulations,” Chase said.

“You, too,” Al said. He clapped Chase on the shoulder. “I hope it’s a fine kid you get.”

Chase looked down at his hands. “I hope so, too.”

Al and Alice would see his demeanor as modest and pleased, but Gina guessed Chase was thinking of the burden the baby would be to him, the drain on his time and sleep and money.

Al said, “I gotta move my knee a little.” He shoved his chair back with a linoleum squeal, straightened with his hands on his thighs and lumbered away from the table.

“Don’t mind him,” Alice said.

“Nothing to mind,” Chase said easily.

“Now,” Alice said. “Why don’t you marry this girl?”

Chase raised his eyebrows at Gina.

“I didn’t—” Gina began, and she looked at the woman. “What do you mean?”

“No reason why not to,” Alice said. “Or is there?”

Chase smiled at Alice, looked out the window and yawned a little self-conscious yawn. “Well, maybe I will,” he said. “No reason why not to.”