The light was going the way it always went on M-28 in October, all at once, as if somebody up past Grand Marais had reached over and turned down a lamp. One minute the birches along the shoulder were lit up yellow as egg yolks, and the next they were gray sticks against a gray sky, and Lake Superior off to the left had gone from blue to the color of a cold skillet.
Dale Haapala had the heater in the wrecker on high and the radio on low. The radio was WJPD out of Ishpeming, and it was playing Huey Lewis for the third time since Marquette, and in the passenger seat his daughter was singing along with all the wrong words and none of the embarrassment.
"It's not 'I want a new truck,'" he said. "It's 'I want a new drug.'"
"That doesn't make any sense," said Birdie. "Why would you sing about drugs? A truck makes sense."
"You've got me there."
She was eight years old and three-quarters, and she sat with her sneakers up on the dash, which was against the rules, and a box of spark plugs in her lap, which was her job. They had driven to Marquette that afternoon for a water pump for Ed Lindberg's Buick, and there was still a smear of cherry Hostess pie on her chin that he had decided not to mention. Her braids were coming loose. They had been coming loose since about nine-fifteen that morning. Dale had learned to braid from a library book called Hairstyles for Little Girls with diagrams that looked like knots in a Boy Scout manual, and he could rebuild a Holley four-barrel in his sleep, but his braids came apart if you looked at them hard.
"Dad," said Birdie. "Somebody's stopped."
He'd already seen it: a station wagon pulled half onto the shoulder past the Au Train turnoff, hazard lights going in the dusk like a slow heartbeat. A Plymouth, a Volaré, tan or what had been tan before about six Upper Peninsula winters had gotten at it. The back end sat low and lopsided. Somebody was crouched by the right rear wheel.
He put his blinker on. He always put his blinker on. There was nobody else on the road, there was nobody else on that road from Munising to Marquette half the time, but Karen used to say he'd signal turning into his own driveway, and she'd been right, and he'd kept doing it after, partly from habit and partly because it was one of the few things she'd teased him about that he could still hear in her voice.
"Stay in the truck," he said.
"I always have to stay in the truck."
"And you always do it so well."
He pulled in behind the wagon with the amber light on the wrecker going and got out into the cold. It was the first real cold of the year, coming in off the big lake with nothing between it and Canada.