Lanterns in the Snow

11:47 PM. I shoulder my overnight tote stuffed only with the T-shirt and shorts I wore in Florida, a swimsuit I did not use, a dirty pair of socks, travel-sized personal hygiene stuffs, and, tucked deep in an inner zipped pocket, the wedding ring that I know for certain now will never be worn again.

It was worth the shot. I tell myself. You never could have been happy unless you'd known for certain. The cold Michigan air rushes to meet me as I step through the glass doors of the Detroit airport. "And you'll never be happy now that you are certain," I say the words aloud. My own voice frightens me with its hollow timbre. I shut my mouth and focus on the countless black smears of gum dotting the sidewalk on my way towards the parking lot where my rusting Chevy Silverado waits.

The long drive home on snowy I-94 East is treacherous and lonely. I listen to NPR until I can't stand hearing anymore about political drama. Maybe if I had been as smooth-talking as one of these suave radio hosts I could have wheedled my ex-wife into coming back home with me. Fat chance of that. She left you for a reason. You're dirt poor, and you planted soy last year when you should've planted corn, and you had to sell another 40 acres just to make ends meet, and even your own son criticizes you behind your back, and you never could figure out how to fix her car. And she never loved you. Ever. She told you so.

The exit for 29 Mile Road catches my eye and snaps off my self-deprecating internal monologue. Only twenty-nine miles from the burning city lights of Detroit, but it's a different world here, small towns flanked by snowy fields and sentineled by barren silos erect as new gravestones against a dark sky. I drive northwest into the town of New Haven, then turn right down a two-lane country road until the pavement ends and my tires melt into the snowy slush of gravel.

Far up the road, blinking taillights catch my eye. I slow down as I approach the vehicle, which has slid halfway off the road into a shallow ditch. A Toyota Civic with Florida plates. My Michigan biases already make me disdain this poor Southerner who drives a foreign vehicle and can't handle a few inches of snow. But the Florida plates make me stop.

I zip my Carhartt back up and brace myself to meet the freezing air before trundling through the snow and tapping on the driver's window. The door immediately swings open and a young girl, probably eighteen or nineteen years old, looks wildly up at me with scared brown eyes.

"Where are you headed? Do you need a ride?" I ask. I could just pick up a chain from my house and pull her back onto the road with my truck, but now that I've seen how young she is I don't want her driving on these roads alone.

Seeing a conflicted look on her face and remembering that she has probably heard stories about rapists and murderers lurking on the back roads and highways of America looking for young girls to prey on, I change my tactic. "Or do you need to borrow a cell phone?"

She decides she can trust me and spills her story into my lap. Apparently she has driven all the way from Tallahassee to Michigan by herself to try to visit her dad who divorced her mom seven years ago, but he moved without telling her where and now she has no idea what to do or where to go. She has no money for a hotel or food, has only a quarter of a tank of gas left, and can't afford to pay a tow truck.

Fifteen minutes later I pull into my driveway, the girl in my passenger seat trying to stop crying. I leave her at my house with a microwave dinner and my cellphone to call her mom, and then head back out into the cold to pull her car out of the ditch and take it to my place for the time-being. How unexpected it all was. I had just returned from Florida hoping against hope to win back the love of my life, failing miserably. She had braved thousands of miles of unknown roads hoping to find love from a father who seemed not care whether he ever saw her again. We were both pathetic.

The next morning before she goes, I feed her breakfast, fill her tank with gas, and press two hundred-dollar bills into her hand, which she takes without a word because she can't talk without crying again. "Be safe," I tell her. And she's gone.

I go back to work on my wife's old car, because maybe one day she will come back and need it. I know the girl will be back in Michigan before long, looking for her dad. Maybe our paths will unexpectedly cross again on one of the dark and twisted roads our doomed routes will lead us on. If they do, it will be like finding a glowing candle in the Michigan snow.