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He left the Twin Cities at four in the afternoon with the sky already gray and thickening. The Ford’s wipers needed replacing. He’d meant to do it in October, had actually gone to the Fleet Farm and stood in the aisle holding the package and then put it back because they wanted eleven dollars for wipers and that seemed like too much. Linda would have had something to say about that. Linda had something to say about the way he loaded the dishwasher and the way he folded towels and the way he cut up all his pancakes before he ate any of them and the way he drove, which was too slow, she said, though he’d never gotten a ticket and she’d gotten two in the last three years, which he didn’t bring up because bringing it up would mean an argument, and the last real one had been about the garage door opener and had gone on for most of a weekend.

The first flakes came somewhere around Forest Lake, scattered, drifting across the windshield. He turned the wipers on and they stuttered and dragged and left half-moons of wet across the glass. Eleven dollars.

The radio was playing the Eagles. He turned it off. He’d never liked the Eagles. Linda liked the Eagles.

The highway was busy, trucks and station wagons, everyone going somewhere on a Thursday. He stayed in the right lane and let them pass. A brown Chevy went by with one of those nodding dogs in the back window. He’d forgotten his gloves. They were on the table by the front door, the thick ones his brother Erik had given him two Christmases ago, or maybe it was three. Erik hadn’t called since August. Erik still owed him three hundred dollars from a Vikings bet he kept calling double or nothing. It wasn’t double or nothing. He’d have to tell Erik about this eventually, the leaving, and Erik would say something about how he should have seen it coming and Erik would be right. Erik was usually right about that kind of thing. He’d been wrong about the Vikings, which was the three hundred dollars.

By Wyoming the snow had settled in.

He thought about stopping for gas. The needle said three-quarters and he didn’t want to stop. He’d been talking to people all day at work, forty-five minutes of it with Kendrick about the new inventory system, which Kendrick understood and he didn’t, and his throat was tired. That was a thing that happened to him now that didn’t used to happen. His throat getting tired.

The duffel bag sat on the back seat. He’d packed it in ten minutes. Two flannel shirts, one with a hole under the arm. Underwear, socks, the shaving kit, a book he’d been reading since September that he wasn’t sure he liked, and a bag of beef jerky from the pantry.

Linda was at work. Or wherever she was. He’d stopped asking and she’d stopped telling him.

He turned the radio back on. Static. He turned it off.

Traffic thinned. The sensible people were pulling off into Perkins lots and Holiday stations. He watched the taillights slide away on the exit ramps. A Winnebago pulled off with its left blinker on.

Linda would be home by now. She’d see the toothbrush missing, the razor. She’d probably notice the Old Spice bottle had moved. She’d given it to him last Christmas and he never wore it, but he kept it anyway, because throwing it away felt like the beginning of a conversation he didn’t want to have. She would not be surprised.

Or she wouldn’t be home at all. She’d be wherever she went on the days she said she was working late. He never checked.

The snow came harder. He slowed to forty-five, then forty. He couldn’t see the ditches. The wipers couldn’t keep up.

A semi passed going south with its headlights in his eyes and threw up so much snow behind it that for a few seconds there was no road at all. He held the wheel and waited. When the road came back the truck was already small in the rearview, and then it was gone.

He drove. The reflector posts came up out of the snow on the right, one, and then nothing for a while, and then another. He counted them and lost count somewhere past thirty and he didn’t start over. A plow went by southbound with its blade up and its orange light turning. After that there was nobody for a long time.

Hinckley. He could stop at Tobies for a caramel roll and coffee and call Linda from the pay phone.

And say what? I don’t know where I’m going? I’m at a restaurant in Hinckley and my fingers are numb because I forgot my gloves?

He kept driving. His back hurt. It always hurt. The doctor said it was a disc, the specialist said an SI joint.

The dashboard clock said 4:27. It had said 4:27 for a while. He watched it and the minutes didn’t change. Something electrical. He’d had a short in the dash light last winter and paid eighty dollars to have it fixed and Linda had said why didn’t you just leave it and he’d said because it bothered me and she’d said that’s the problem with you, everything bothers you. They’d had that conversation maybe two hundred times in the last five years, over the dash light and things like it.

The wipers were done. Ice built up at the base of the blades and each pass smeared more than it cleared. He hunched forward. His neck ached. He should pull over and clear the blades by hand but he didn’t want to stop. If he stopped he’d have to stand outside the car in the cold and then decide to keep going.

The radio came on by itself. He hadn’t touched it. A woman singing something slow that he knew and couldn’t name, with the static moving around her voice. Linda used to sing. She had a decent voice, a little flat on the high notes, and she’d sing while she cooked. She stopped sometime around 1980. He couldn’t remember if he’d noticed when it happened.

He turned the radio off.

Past Sandstone the snow changed. The flakes got bigger and softer and there were more of them, and the headlights went out into it and didn’t find the end.

Sandstone had burned in the same fire as Hinckley, back in 1894, though Hinckley was the one people remembered. His father had known a man from Sandstone whose mother was a little girl there when it burned. He’d never heard the rest of that story. There wasn’t anybody to ask about it now.

He thought about the cabin. His father’s place up past Grand Marais. Two years since he’d been there. Maybe three. The pipes would be frozen. Mice in everything. But there was a wood-burning stove and birch stacked under the overhang.

She’d never liked the cabin. Too remote. She couldn’t sleep there, she said. The last time they went, ‘75 or ‘76, she read magazines by the stove, turning the pages fast, and he fished off the dock and caught nothing. It rained the second day. They drove home without talking and stopped at a McDonald’s and sat across from each other with Quarter Pounders and he remembered thinking this is over. And then they went on for another ten years.

He had a thought about the cabin that he tried to hold onto, something about walking in and what it would smell like, but it slipped away. He was tired.

Grand Marais was three hours past Duluth in this weather. Duluth was an hour and a half. The math was bad.

He almost missed Moose Lake. The sign came up out of the white and was gone. He hadn’t seen another car since Sandstone. He hadn’t eaten since the lunchroom at noon and his stomach hurt.

The gas gauge hadn’t moved. Three-quarters, same as Wyoming. That was eighty miles back, maybe ninety. The Ford got eighteen on the highway. The needle sat there.

He drove. The snow didn’t seem to be falling anymore. It was just there, all of it, and he was driving in it. The sky and the ground had gone the same color and the road was two faint ruts where other tires had been before. He was driving by the slight banking of the curves, by twenty years of this highway in better weather.

There was a night in 1979 or maybe 1980 when they were watching TV and she said something, he couldn’t remember what, and he didn’t answer. He was reading the paper. She didn’t say it again.

She used to lean back into him when he came up behind her at the kitchen window. Just an inch. And then she stopped. He didn’t know when.

The road curved and the back end broke loose. He turned into it the way his father taught him in the parking lot of the Lutheran church when he was sixteen, his father saying again, again. The tires caught. His heart was going hard and his hands were shaking.

The radio came on again. Same woman, same song, and he had it now. It was one Linda used to sing at the stove. He reached for the knob and his hand stopped halfway there and stayed there a while. Then he turned it off. The knob was cold under his finger.

The road was gone. He could feel it in the wheels, turning on nothing, white above and white below. The Ford went on through it.

He wasn’t afraid. He thought about the house on Sunday afternoons when Linda was out and the TV was off and there was nothing to do and nothing he wanted to do either.

He remembered a joke Erik told at Thanksgiving. Something about a bartender and a marriage. Erik had laughed. Linda hadn’t. He couldn’t remember the joke now, just Erik laughing and the turkey sitting there getting cold because nobody wanted to be the one to say let’s eat.

His father died in the cabin. February. Heart attack, or that’s what Doc Halvorsen said. The mail carrier found him. Three days. He was sitting in the chair by the stove with a cup of frozen coffee. The cup had a walleye on it. A gas station cup. The funeral he could barely picture. His mother’s face, gone. But he could still see the walleye on the cup, green and yellow, and the chip on the rim you had to remember to turn away when you drank.

His father built the cabin in ‘62. Hauled lumber up the dirt road alone. Finished in October.

Something in the headlights. A man walking on the shoulder, or where the shoulder would be, in a canvas coat. He slowed. The man looked up. His father’s face, younger than any photo he’d seen. His father raised a hand.

Then he was past him and the snow had filled in behind.

His back ached. His hands were numb. He wished he had the gloves.

October ‘69. Linda in a dress her mother made. He’d been so sure. He was twenty-four.

His father dying and Linda at the funeral not touching him. The miscarriages, the two of them, which they called “the miscarriage,” just the one. The warehouse and Kendrick. Linda on the couch watching The Price Is Right with the sound off for three weeks after the school let her go. The fact that he chewed ice and his fingernails. The fact that she left her shoes in the middle of the hallway. He was up to the shoes and he made himself quit.

The snow fell and he drove on.

The whiteness thinned. He felt it in his eyes first, some change in the pressure, and then the road came back, a gray line, and then the ditches, and the pines standing along them.

DULUTH 12 MILES.

The clock said 5. Just the 5.

He drove through Duluth. Plows out. Stoplights swinging in the wind. He stopped at a red light behind a city bus with an ad for a personal injury lawyer, the lawyer’s face huge and beaming, and he sat there looking at it and wondering how long you’d have to hold a smile like that for a photographer. He thought about what the lawyer’s wife thought about the ad. He thought about whether the lawyer had a wife. The light changed.

He stopped at a Holiday station. The kid behind the counter was reading Dune. He remembered reading Dune. He couldn’t remember if he’d liked it. He paid for the gas. He got a coffee and a box of powdered donuts. His hands were stiff making the change and he dropped a nickel and the kid picked it up for him.

“Headed north?” the kid said.

“Yeah.”

“Storm’s supposed to get worse.”

“That’s what they say.”

“My uncle’s got a place up in Silver Bay. Says the snow up there is something else.”

“I bet.”

“Drive safe.”

He took 61 along the lake. Clouds low, couldn’t see the water. Through Two Harbors. Past Castle Danger and Gooseberry. The pines came down to the edge of the highway.

He pulled into a wayside a few miles past Gooseberry. Empty lot except for a Buick nearly buried in snow. Bathrooms closed. He parked and killed the engine.

He sat there a while. He didn’t think about much.

There was a pay phone by the bathrooms. He walked to it. The receiver was hanging loose. The dial tone came through low. He put a quarter in and dialed home, and when the operator asked for more he put in the rest of his change. It rang. He counted the rings. At ten he hung up and stood there with his hand still on the receiver, looking at the snow.

He ate the donuts in the car. The coffee was cold. One of the donuts had no powdered sugar on it, just bare cake, and he ate that one last. Linda ate the worst thing on her plate last too.

When it was all the way dark he reclined the seat and closed his eyes.

He dreamed about driving. Linda in the passenger seat. She was saying something but the defroster was too loud.

He woke to everything covered. Pale sun behind clouds. The Buick was gone. No tracks.

He started the engine. The dashboard clock was blank. Gas gauge, three-quarters.

He pulled onto 61.

The road was plowed and empty. Black line, white everything else. Grand Marais was ahead of him. The cabin was ahead of him. He thought about his father sitting in the chair and he thought about the stove and the birch and he thought about whether the mice had gotten into the coffee and he thought about nothing.

Linda would be up by now and standing at the window over the sink with her coffee. She’d go to work and the house would be quiet.

He tried to think about what coming back would mean, putting the duffel bag in the closet and Linda in the kitchen or Linda not in the kitchen, and he couldn’t make the picture hold. It kept going flat on him.

The highway followed the shore. Pines on the left, and on the right the white where the lake was. He looked in the rearview and there was nothing, just the road and the snow.

He drove. He turned the wipers on. They worked.

There was more snow coming, he could see it building in the west, a dark band low on the sky.