The driver offered her a bag of nuts and a Coke from a cooler in the jump seat. How did he know she was starving? There was beer in it too. She drank it by sips. The shadows in the headlights were only shadows. The pickup stood for a long time. High beams. The road was narrow and pocked—marked from poor engineering and cheaters in the construction phase. So many small country roads this far north were built over ice lenses, unwittingly or just typical cheap planning. The lenses lifted the pavement first, the elastic action of a great inhale. In time, the rock exhaled and the ribbon slumped as the heated cement melted itself.

“Mm,” said the driver.

She was tired. She was making no sense. She was filthy, too thin, and wild looking.

“My children are in St. Cecilia,” she said and the driver turned the heat up a notch. She told him, “Everything’s gone.” Her name first was stolen years ago, a real soap opera. All she wanted was scrambled eggs. The driver had snack food and told her not to wolf it.

“It was really all Grannie’s fault,” she told the man.

He offered her aspirin. The cotton was still jammed under the cap. He dug with his fingers.

“Cat got your tongue?” she said.

The pills spilled into the chasm of the footwell.

“Never mind,” she said. “Could you take me there? To St. Cecilia. I’ll pay you for gas. Every penny.”

She looked around for a purse. The town was a small one. The driver nodded. All the way around the mountains. The driver knew the place. She turned the heat dial down the same notch the driver had recently raised. Though shivering, she wasn’t exactly cold. It was some other kind of shiver, crackling from inside like the road did, breaking out, since cement was not meant to bend at all. She was like that.

“Hurry,” she said.

The driver stepped on the gas.

She looked at him, kindly. “Is there something wrong with you too?”

The ice lenses were only the beginning, she told him, added to lifting and slumping, even greater aggravation brought on by the tiniest of ongoing seasonal effects, moisture filling tiny cracks, forming holes, pits, freezing, thawing, requiring, in the end, always a big machine with a bucket. She blinked. Oh, she was tired of buckets.

The pickup had turned again, speeding south, and in a few miles she found herself kneeling on the bench seat, facing back, hands on the cold rear glass of the cab.