"Joanne," Del said into the phone. "I have to go. I love you. I'll call you tomorrow."
She hung up before her daughter could answer. Then she took her key ring off the hook.
"Harvey," she said. "Get your coat. And the big flashlight. We're going to town."
Harvey looked at her. "Del. The roads are glass."
"I know what the roads are. I've driven them on worse." She was already pulling on her boots. "Brynn, honey, get your coat on too. And bring that tablet."
She called Arlo Fisk from the truck. Arlo was the manager of the telephone cooperative now. He had been a skinny kid on her crew in 1989, and she had taught him how to climb.
"Arlo, it's Del Moe. Is the central office down?"
"Del? Yeah, the whole exchange is dark. Power company says the substation took a line. The backup generator at the office should have kicked on. It didn't. I've got a crew coming from Minot, but they're two hours out on these roads."
"It's the transfer switch," Del said. "Isn't it."
A long pause on the line.
"How did you know that?"
"Because it stuck in 1997 and again in 2003," Del said. "It sticks when it ices. It's the same switch, isn't it, Arlo? You never replaced it."
"It's on the list," Arlo said weakly.
"I'm ten minutes from the office. Do you want me to try it?"
Another pause. Then Arlo laughed, tired and a little embarrassed.
"Del, you still have the key, don't you."
"I've still got every key," Del said.
"Then you're authorized," Arlo said. "Go."
The Antler Butte Telephone Cooperative central office was a squat brick building at the edge of town, behind the grain elevator, built in 1962. Inside were the switches and the fiber that carried every phone line and internet connection for three hundred square miles of prairie.
Del had worked out of that building for thirty-one years. She found the side door in the dark by feel. The key was the fourth one on the ring, brass, worn smooth. It turned on the first try.
Harvey held the flashlight. Brynn held Harvey's hand.
The generator room was at the back. The generator itself sat silent. On the wall beside it was a gray steel cabinet with a handle on the front and a sticker that said AUTOMATIC TRANSFER SWITCH. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
"Hold the light steady, Harvey," Del said. "Right on the handle."
She opened the cabinet. Inside, the big switch sat halfway between two positions, frozen, a skin of frost on the contacts where the cold had crept in through a vent that should have been sealed twenty years ago.
"There you are," Del said softly, the way you talk to a cow that has gotten itself stuck in a fence.
She took off her glove and laid her bare palm flat against the steel housing of the switch for a slow count of thirty, to warm it. Then she put her glove back on, set both hands on the manual handle, braced her bad shoulder against the cabinet, and pulled.
Nothing.
She pulled again. Her shoulder burned.
"Del," Harvey said. "Let me."
"No. You'll pull it straight. You have to pull it down and to the left. It only goes if you lean on it." She took a breath. "Orrin used to say I was the stubbornest woman in Ward County. Let's find out."
She leaned.
The switch went over with a clunk that echoed through the whole brick building.
Behind them, the generator coughed, caught, and roared to life.
All down the long dark room, green and amber lights began to blink on, one after another, rack by rack, like a little town coming back on after a storm.
Brynn's tablet chimed at seven fifty-eight.
She was sitting on a metal folding chair in the break room of the central office, under a calendar from 1998 that the crew had never taken down. Harvey sat on one side of her. Del stood in the doorway.
The screen flickered. Then a young woman's face appeared, in a tan uniform, in a small room somewhere very far away, with a little paper Christmas tree taped to the wall behind her.
"Brynnie? Baby, can you hear me?"
"Mom," Brynn said. "Mom. We had an ice storm, and Del had to fix the telephone company."
Kari Lindahl laughed. Then she started to cry. Then Brynn did too, and so did Harvey, very quietly, looking at the floor.
Del stepped out into the hallway to give them the room. She leaned against the cold brick wall in her barn coat and closed her eyes.
Her shoulder hurt like the devil. She did not mind at all.
They drove home at nine, slowly, on the glazed section road, with Brynn asleep in the back seat.
Harvey did not say anything for the first four miles. Then he said, "The stubbornest woman in Ward County."
"That's what he said."
"He was right." Harvey kept his eyes on the road. "Del. I know what's on the refrigerator. I wrote it. But I'd like to tell you something, and you can tell me to go to the devil if you want."
"Go ahead."
"I got ideas," Harvey said. "Somewhere around Thanksgiving. I'm sorry."
Del looked out the window at the ice shining on the fence wire in the headlights.
"I got mine around the kitchen sink," she said. "When you fixed the drip."
Kari Lindahl came home from her deployment in March. Harvey's new house was finished the same week. Del and Brynn helped him move in on a Saturday, with the dog running circles in the yard.
On April 1, Del came downstairs in the morning and found the feed store note gone from her refrigerator.
In its place was a new one, in the same block letters, on the same notepad.
HARVEY ASKS IF HE MIGHT COME FOR SUPPER ON SUNDAYS. INDEFINITELY. DEL MAY SAY NO. NO FUNNY IDEAS.
Under it, Harvey had signed. And under his name, in purple marker, with a heart over the i, so had Brynn.
Del read it twice. Then she took the pen out of the kitchen drawer, crossed out the last line, and wrote one word above it.
Too late.