Probably not.

There was a small jump seat behind the passenger seat and the boy and the dog watched patiently as I wrestled with the car seat in back of them until I got it anchored as best I could with its one lap belt. For her part, Annabelle stared up at me with her round white face and blue eyes and, or so it seemed to me, a wry smile of both comfort and victory. Somewhere I’d read an observation by a writer and it came to mind as I tucked a blanket around the baby: It is rare to see the promise of a man in a young boy but you’ll always see the spirit of a woman in a little girl. Annabelle was damn sure her mother’s daughter.

Once again I thought of the road ahead, and the weather. A smarter man with less experience might have checked the weather conditions on the road ahead. I knew better. In all likelihood I knew I would need at least a hundred different weather reports, one for every mile of two-lane blacktop, and a hundred more for the return. I’d probably see a little of everything the road and sky had to offer—snow, ice, rain, freezing rain interspersed with sunlight and clouds, low and high, dark and bright, and sometimes everything all at once. Hell, somewhere along the way it might even turn nice—for a minute or two.

My route along State Highway 117 took me through the heart of a hundred miles of nowhere before dead-ending at the dying former coal-mining town of Rockmuse, population 2,344. I climbed up on the driver’s side running board and tried to bore a hole through the blowing snow to guess what the day might bring, which was as futile an exercise as trying to tell the future. I was stalling and I knew it, hoping a solution to my predicament might present itself. It didn’t. Go to work or turn around and call it a day? The soft vibration of the diesel engine rose through my feet and the nearby air was tinged with oddly sweet exhaust fumes trapped by the snow and cold air.

I did a quick inventory of cargo and the schedule of deliveries to determine if any of them were absolutely necessary. A couple ranchers and a desert rat needed the fifty-gallon plastic drums of water I was hauling. Those fifty-gallon containers of water might be life or death. I didn’t know. Then there was the mail. The mail was the least important cargo.

A couple months earlier I had been fortunate to secure the contract to take the US Mail to the Rockmuse Post Office—not that there was ever very much of it or anyone particularly cared. The postmaster, Calvin Harper, was a short, affable guy in his late fifties or more. He was locally famous for the model airplanes he built and which were dangled on wire from every spare inch of ceiling space of the tiny post office. He had that kind of time on his hands. Water. Mail. Ten cases of bulk oil. Parts to repair an old windmill. Fresh vegetables for the Rockmuse Mercantile Grocery. There were other miscellaneous odds and ends. It came down to the water, as it often did.

Do my job or turn around and go home? Ginny knew damn well I’d head out into the desert, no matter the weather, with or without Annabelle. She didn’t even ask me to cancel my workday. I doubted it even crossed her mind.