The thin insulators of the car’s glass and vinyl and rustchewed steel no longer held back the cold, and her fingers began to sting. She rubbed her hands together quickly, and blew into them, and shoved them as balled fists into the pockets of her armpits and breasts. The child sat next to her staring straightforward and uncharacteristically calm, as if good behavior alone could deliver them. She noticed the shallowness of his breath.

It’s okay, honey, she said. It’s okay. We don’t have anything to worry about.

She could see the child in the moonlight and when a chance cloud obscured the moon and darkened the land around them she knew he was there from the chattering of tiny teeth. She grabbed the child’s unshod feet.

Come here, baby, she said.

Even to her numb hands the child’s feet were cold. Her heart began to race. The nameless mass inside her responded with a thump. She blew on the child’s feet, and massaged them, and unwound her scarf to wrap them in. When the child’s feet were bundled in the scarf, she removed her hat and stuffed his wrapped feet in it. The cold air on her bare head and neck sent a shock down her spine that tightened the muscles of her back and shoulders. Another painful thump.

It’s okay, honey, she said. Is that better?

The child said nothing. His lips and jaw shook.

Light shone bright in her eyes, reflected by the rearview mirror.

She put her weight into rolling down the window and reached out. She waved her arm. The car roared past, not slowing, not honking, as if a car sitting unlit only partway onto the shoulder in the dark of night was a common sight, as if a woman’s frantic beckoning did not register, as if they too were afraid of what might happen. Icy wind whirled in the car’s passing, buffeting her hand, face and neck. She wrenched the window closed.

The child looked at her, then looked forward quickly. They were both now colder. The child had begun to tremble. She took his hands and blew into them. She put her own hands between her legs.

It’s okay for right now, she said. Yes, just like that. No, it’s okay.

She tried the key again, twisting it forward, turning it back. She tried again. She removed the key and reinserted it several times, imitating something she had seen someone her frostaddled brain could not name do in a situation she could not picture. The car gave no sign of response. No reluctant engine’s coughing grind. No brief and fading dashboard light.

It was not the plan to leave their home for the cold and the night, to be exposed to this brutality of happenstance and poor planning by the impoverished luck of a cheap car, cheaply serviced, dying without warning. Ken was not supposed to get back to the depot for another day, and in midmorning then, when the child was not asleep in his tiny bed in his handmedown pajamas. She could not have left the child alone, and she could not have not gone to get Ken. If Ken was going to let her have the car while he was overland, she had to pick him up when he got back. He would be so angry that they were late. And his car. He would demand to know what she had done.

Her throat tightened, and she turned her head away to hide from the child her first choking sob, which like a sneeze she could never suppress. She raised her hands to her face to muffle herself. When she regained control she looked at the child looking at her.

Sometimes, she said, sometimes keys work better if you blow on them.

She blew on the keys, and leaned forward to insert the key into the ignition.

Wish me luck, she said and smiled.

Good luck, the child said.

When she sat back frustrated once again by the key’s failure she saw the twinlight of another car coming at them from the distance. She rolled down the window and waved her arm, and when the car did not slow she pounded angrily on the horn but aside from the dead thud of her fist’s impact on the vinyl of the steering wheel, lost in the caterwauling of the wind, the horn made no sound.

Okay, she said. She rolled up the window. Her face and neck felt raw from the brittle wind. Her hand and arm tingled dully from striking the horn.

Okay, she said. She took a breath. She had to make a decision.

Okay, baby, we need to try to walk to that farmhouse up there.

The child looked at her, his eyes a small amount wider. His body shuddered as if afflicted with dyskinesia.

Can you see it? she said. Up there? Try to look.

The child slid forward to the edge of the seat and stretched his small torso and short neck to look over the ridge of the dashboard. He looked at her and shook his head.

You can’t see it? she said. Well. Well, I know it’s there. Remember all those pigs? The farm with all the pigs?

The child nodded.

That’s the one, she said. She looked up the road, and then behind them, but saw no coming cars.

Okay, she said. When we go outside it’s going to be really cold. Okay? I need you to stay inside my coat as best you can, and keep your arms around my neck, and stay awake. Can you do that? Can you do those things for me?

The child looked at her, and then looked forward, and then back at her. His teeth clattered. She took the hat and scarf from his feet and put them on him properly, on his head and around his neck.

She circled around the car, and opened the door, and hoisted the child up on to her hip. He wrapped his legs around her waist under her rotund belly and clasped his arms around her neck. She began to walk, burdened by the cold and the weight of her two children. The ice and snow and gravel crunched under her rubber soled boots and the wind blew gelid air over their synthetic fur lining and around her naked calves and up her flannel nightgown in waves of prickling frigidity. She shook, but not like the child who rattled violently as if mechanized for that purpose or held by angry hands. His powerful trembling so near her body reminded her of the bed she and Ken had once slept in at a motel, a quarter for five minutes of pleasureless rumbling. The land around them was flat and endless and a slight bit lighter than the sky above, a patchwork of fathomless black and bluegray clouds surrounding the oblong moon. The wind howled unbroken and unbound by tree or building or jutting hill, rattling the barbed wire of the fences lining the road, curling past her ears and whipping her hair around her face and into her eyes. She heard no lowing or snuffling of livestock. If it was there, it was carried away by the wind. She walked as fast as she could.

The child shook still but his breath on her neck slowed and so she nudged his head with her chin.

You still with me? she said. Talk to me.

The child looked up at her.

Talk to me, she said.

Why is it so cold? he asked.

She recalled a class, a general requirement which the school forced upon all of them not to ensure basic aptitude in arithmetic or composition but to expose them to different disciplines and different frames of reason, that she had taken before the hardships of pregnancy forced her to drop out, before she had met Ken who teased her for her reading and gotten pregnant once more. The man who taught the class, the professor, was older and odd and his glasses slipped down his face as he paced the classroom and the other students mocked him viciously out of class for his large ears and long elocutions and sudden silences but she thought him brilliant and hoped there would forever be room for people like him in her life. The class was Oceanography and what it impressed upon her was the importance of the sun in all things.

I don’t know, she said.

Is the baby going to die? he said.

No, she said. No. Please don’t think that. No.

The car was almost upon her when she heard it, deafened by the wind as she was. She heard the child’s gasp, and then the horn, and then the grinding gravel. With no trees or signs or fenceposts to illuminate, the headlights had given no warning. She had not noticed their shadows lengthen out in front of them.

Jesus, lady, the man said. He was out of his car, looking at them over the roof.

Are you okay? he said.

Our car broke down, she said.

Come on, he said. I’ll drive you.

He was heading around the front end of the car, bearded, in a dark coat and dark pants. He had turned the car’s lights off. He was large. She could not make him out. She took a step back.

No, she said. No.

Jesus, lady, he said, don’t mess around. You, you and the kid, you got to get in here and let me drive you someplace.

No, she said. We’re walking. My husband will come and get us.

He looked at them, and then up the road. He looked at them again.

Well, he said. I ain’t trying to hurt you.

Thanks, she said, but-

You ain’t dressed for this weather, he said.

I know, but, she said. Ken will come and get us. When we’re not there to get him he’ll know.

The man looked up the road once more. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat.

Sure? he said. It’s too cold out here to screw around like this.

Yes, she said. We’re walking.

Okay, he said. Where’s he at?

Canaan Consolidated, she said and she began to walk. She leaned into the wind and clasped the jittering child tighter to her. She held her breath until the large loud car crept slowly around them and accelerated up the road.

Why didn’t, the child said.

We’ll be okay, she said.

Plodding forward over ice and dust and shattered stone she looked around her to keep sleepiness at bay. The land was all the blue of a lidded eye in a dim room and there was not much else. The heifers that idled silently black and white and muddied in the green of the pastures were nowhere to be seen. They must be in a barn somewhere, she thought, sleeping afoot. Or slaughtered. She had no sense of the lives of cows. She looked ahead and saw that the windows of the farmhouse were unlit. They’re asleep, of course, she thought, they’re asleep.

Huh? the child said.

Nothing, she said.

They’re asleep, she thought. At this hour a farmer would of course be asleep. He and his farmer’s wife would awaken at the knock, and they would creep downstairs nervously in nightdresses, and cautiously twist the doorknob, or pull aside the curtain and peer through the window, or call through the door in an exaggerated baritone and realize her predicament and the child’s and set the rifle on the counter or lean it against the doorjamb and invite them in. And if they’re not? she thought. If they’re gone? Farmers don’t travel, she thought. Farmers don’t travel. She had no sense of the lives of farmers. She was so tired.

We’ll break in if we have to, she said and the child let it go without response.

She descended from the road into the dull circle of yellow light that hummed downward out of a lamppost towering over the driveway. Her face raw and her bare legs and hands numb and her mind untamed by wind and cold and fear. She could not tell if the child had stopped shaking. A low wooden fence braced a short wooden archway which read Welcome in letters formed of lacquered sticks and held high an owl carved of a single log. They passed through it and breached the low porch and she stood holding the child uncertain of whether she had knocked on the door’s ice crusted pane whatsoever let alone hard enough until they were greeted by a hoarse gasp and led into a sudden and painful warmth.

He had close-set eyes but otherwise handsome features and he wore a robe that she could not afford even on sale and his wife moved with grace and purpose. The blanket she was wrapped in smelled like dryer sheets. She thanked them until they asked her not to thank them anymore and the child drank warm milk and enjoyed their attention. After a time in the warmth under the quiet watch of the man and his wife, after her sense seeped back in to her, a long truck roared by and rattled a loose pane in an adjacent room.

That must be Ken? he said.

This is the year we get that window fixed, the wife said.

The man threw over himself a fine herringbone coat and in a moment they heard from the garage the chirruping of a cold engine being coaxed into starting. In the intervening moments the wife asked impersonal questions and performed for the child a senseless pantomime using woodheaded hand puppets of beasts and harlequins that flopped about like dead men on horseback as her hands moved to the shrill voices she lent them.

When I was about your age I wanted to be an actress, the wife said to neither of them in particular.

The man soon returned and they got into his sedan and drove to Ken’s truck, idling behind her Chevette. She watched the odometer. It was three quarters of one mile. Ken stood with a flashlight scouring the car’s open hood, and the man went and stood with him while she and the child clambered with difficulty into the cab of the sixteen wheeler.

The child had never been in the truck before and she could tell from the way he looked at the panels and out the window that he was enjoying himself. She, with her pregnant and exhausted body, felt sick for the jolts at every application of the brake, at every shifting gear. The seat, cold and cracked pleather held riveted to the cabin’s floor by coiled iron springs, shook her. She thought she might vomit.

Ken turned right toward Billhaven when the normal course would have taken them left, quickly home, toward Dellington.

Truck’s not driving right, he said.

That guy you sent was a fucking poindexter, he said and he laughed at his choice of words.

Tuh tuh tuh tuh, he said.

Could not get his words out, he said.

* * *

It was a dozen or more years after the cold and the night, after she had returned to finish her degree and gone on to complete another, after he had filled not only their garage but a rented storage shed with the useless trinkets he insisted on keeping, after he had struck the child to the ground and the child lifted himself up to dare him to do it once more, that she decided that she would not just divorce Ken, she would punish him for everything she had wasted on him, and she would enjoy it.