Ayisha and I turned in unison to see a snow-dusted Steve enter the kitchen with a cardboard box of groceries from CK and set them on a back counter.

“Done!” he proclaimed. “What a day, huh?”

Then he turned as he wiped his brow and grinned widely at us.

And I was pretty certain I was looking at a Christmas miracle.

Twenty-Nine

Twenty minutes later, that certainty about a miracle was wearing off.

Steve and I had successfully made it out of the neighborhood in his green El Camino. But the farther we got from the inn, the more concerned I grew. It occurred to me as I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Steve, hunched forward over the steering wheel, peering through the half-de-iced windshield and his own yellow-lensed night-driving visor, that I hadn’t actually thought this through.

I wasn’t worried about Steve. Everyone knew him and knew he was eccentric, not criminal. It was more about the weather and the sheets of snow that were still falling, accompanied by stronger wind than I’d realized, which reduced the visibility to maybe fifty feet beyond the front of the car.

We were on our way toward U.S. 77, which was a two-lane route to Norman. Thankfully the roads were almost completely empty, other than the occasional oncoming eighteen-wheeler that appeared out of the hazy winter wall of snow like a monster from the mist.

Folks still talked about the Christmas Eve blizzard of 2009 that dumped fourteen inches of snow on Oklahoma in twenty-four hours. No one ever thought that would happen again. However, the farther out into this mess we got, the more I was starting to think it just might.

And I was out in it. On a quest. Like an idiot.

“Steve, are you sure you’re cool with this?” I asked, hoping I had disguised the concern from my voice.

He looked over at me then pointed at the driving visor. “Oh, yeah. This thing’s a wonder. I was starting to think I was having a brain aneurysm the way my eyesight was dimming at night but this cleared it right up.” He tapped the yellow visor for emphasis.

“Speaking of eyes . . .” I nodded to the front windshield, which he hadn’t faced once for the past ten seconds.

He laughed a single, hard cough-laugh, which seemed to have dislodged something from his lungs. He rolled down his manual window, bringing in a freezing blast of air, then forgot the lyrics of a Jim Croce song and spit into the wind, which, yep, came right back into his visor. The attempt to wipe it off made matters worse.

“Now it’s blurry!” he shouted over the din of the swirling wind.

“Roll up the window!” I shouted back, hugging my coat closer to my body.

He rolled up the window.

Or made the attempt.

Unfortunately, it jammed midway.