The car didn’t move. I watched as she sat behind the wheel. When she opened the door she sat a long moment and stared at me before getting out. She left her car idling and walked slowly back to me and gave me a tired smile.

“I don’t know what to do, Ben.” She rested her chin on my chest. “I’m so exhausted I can’t think.”

This was a side of her I knew had to exist, though I’d just never seen it before. She didn’t let me see it. She didn’t let anyone see it, even herself. That was her way. The way she did it all. Eyes straight ahead. No prisoners. No quarter given and none asked for.

“Are you asking for advice?”

Her head didn’t move from my chest and she let out a deep sigh into my flannel shirt. “I fell asleep at work the other night. Facedown and snoring like a pig on a clearance counter I was supposed to be stocking. When I woke up some of the older women were standing around me so the manager couldn’t see me. I would have been fired. They had just been letting me sleep for as long as they could. I was so embarrassed.”

“Do what you have to do,” I said. I might have tried to hug her, but I didn’t.

She pulled her head back from my chest and stared up at me. “Okay, then,” she said. “Suck it up, cowboy.”

She sped away and left me draped in a baby and pink diaper bag like a daycare scarecrow in a concrete field.

I was reviewing my very short list of alternate choices when a gas tanker made the left-hand turn off US 191 into the truck stop. Davey Owens drove between Salt Lake City and Moab. He was a decent-enough, hardworking man with a wife and three kids at home. Davey inched his big rig to a stop near the spot where Ginny had been and rolled down his window. He leaned on his bare left arm and studied me for a few seconds.

“I sense there has been a change for Price’s most eligible bachelor.”

I was busy choosing the right words for my response. Davey was a straight arrow, a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian. All the words that came to mind consisted of four letters and graphic instructions.

“You okay?” he asked.

I said I was.

“Then you best get your new family out of this cold.”

His rig began to move forward again. As he rolled up his window I could see him shaking his head. I know I was shaking mine, in frustration or disbelief I couldn’t have said—probably a bit of both, followed quickly by resignation.

From where I stood the empty highway stretched a couple hundred feet in the general direction of Moab before disappearing into a wall of shifting white embraced by darkness, like a tunnel probably leading to more than a hundred miles of the same. Maybe not.