Darnell didn't say anything for a moment. He eased the truck down into the line of stopped traffic, crawling, and thought.
Forty-one years on the road teaches you two things. Every road has another road behind it. And somebody always knows where it is.
He reached for the CB.
"Breaker one-nine," he said. "Looking for the Sagebrush Kid. Hollis, you out there? This is Nightshift."
Kayla stared at him. "Nightshift?"
"That's my handle. Forty years." He keyed the mic again. "Hollis Teague, you old cow thief. Come back."
There was nothing but static for a long minute. Darnell called again.
Then a voice came back, old and dry as a fence post. "Nightshift? Thought you'd be dead by now."
"Not yet," Darnell said. "Hollis, I need a back door to Antelope Springs. There's a wreck on eighty. I've got a bride in my cab, and her wedding's at four."
There was another pause.
"Say that again," Hollis said. "Did you say a bride?"
Darnell had met Hollis Teague in 1989, in a truck stop café in Rawlins, during a ground blizzard that closed I-80 for two days. They'd sat at the counter drinking coffee for forty hours, and Hollis had told him every story there was about ranching in Carbon County.
They'd talked on the CB a few times a year ever since. Hollis ran cattle on twenty thousand acres south of the interstate, between Elk Mountain and Antelope Springs.
"Take the Elk Mountain exit," Hollis said. "Go south on the county road four miles to my cattle guard. Big gate, red mailbox. I'll meet you there."
"Can a loaded fifty-three-footer make it?"
"Cattle trucks run that road every week," Hollis said. "It's gravel, it's washboard, and it'll rattle your teeth out. But it'll come out on the Antelope Springs road about two miles from the church. Saves you the whole interstate."
Darnell glanced at the clock. 2:39.
"We're coming," he said.
The line of traffic was crawling. It took Darnell eleven minutes to make the two miles to the exit. He took the ramp at 2:50, turned south onto the county road, and opened her up as much as he dared.
Hollis Teague was waiting at the cattle guard in a dusty white ranch pickup. He was eighty-one, small and bowlegged, with a straw hat and a face like a dried apple. He swung the big steel gate open and stood beside it with his hat in his hand as the semi rolled past, and he stared up at the bride in the passenger window with his mouth open.
Kayla waved at him. He waved back with his hat.
Then he jumped in his pickup and pulled out ahead of them to lead the way.
It was twenty-two miles of gravel. The washboard was so bad that Darnell had to hold the wheel with both hands, and the trailer banged and rattled behind them like a freight train full of pots and pans.
Dust rolled up behind them in a long brown cloud. Antelope stood on the ridgelines and watched them go by.
Kayla held her veil on with one hand and her bouquet of silk flowers in her lap with the other. She'd stopped crying.
"My dad would have loved this," she said over the noise.
"Yeah?"
"He always took the back road. Every single time. Mom used to say he couldn't drive a straight line to save his life." She laughed. "I think I'm going to tell this story at every Thanksgiving for the rest of my life."
At 3:41, the gravel turned to blacktop. At 3:46, they came over a low hill and saw it. A white wooden church with a steeple, a gravel parking lot full of pickups, and a cluster of people in good clothes standing out front looking up the road.
Darnell leaned on the air horn. Twice, long and loud.
The people in front of the church turned around. And a young man in a gray suit came running down the front steps and across the parking lot like he was being chased by a bull.
Darnell pulled the truck onto the shoulder across from the church at 3:49 and set the brakes. Eleven minutes to spare.
Josh got to the passenger door first. He was a big, sunburned young man with a cowlick and tears running down his face. Behind him came Kayla's mother, and four bridesmaids in sage green, and an old woman with a cane who turned out to be Kayla's grandmother.
Darnell climbed down and went around and helped Kayla out of the cab, the same way he'd helped her in, with her mother holding the train. She landed on the gravel in a cloud of white satin and dust. Josh put his arms around her and wouldn't let go.
"Josh," Kayla's mother said, "you're not supposed to see her."
"I don't care," Josh said, and didn't let go.
Then Kayla's mother turned and looked at Darnell. She was a small woman in a blue dress, and she held out her hand to him and couldn't say anything at all.
"Ma'am," Darnell said, "your husband's truck is locked up safe on eighty, just west of Laramie, with a flare behind it. I'll make the call for a tow as soon as I get a bar."
She shook her head and hugged him instead.
He was climbing back up into his cab when Kayla caught his arm.
"Mr. Rhodes," she said. "Wait."
He turned around.
She had her veil pushed back now, and her mascara was a disaster, and she'd never looked happier. Her mother stood behind her with one hand pressed over her heart.
"I was going to walk down the aisle by myself," Kayla said. "With Daddy's picture in my bouquet. I didn't want anybody else to take his place." She took a breath. "But you got me here in his truck's place. Would you walk me down?"
Darnell looked at her mother. Her mother nodded, crying.
He looked down at his shirt. It was the clean one, at least. He'd put it on at a truck stop in Cheyenne that morning.
"Miss Strand," he said, "I'd be honored."
He walked her down the aisle at the Antelope Springs Methodist Church at 4:02 that afternoon, a sixty-eight-year-old trucker in a work shirt and his good boots, with a bride on his arm and a photograph of a lineman tucked into her bouquet. Hollis Teague stood in the back pew with his hat over his heart.
Darnell got back on the road at six and drove as far as the truck stop in Rawlins, where he took his ten-hour break, the way the law says. Shirley had already called the warehouse in Salt Lake and moved his delivery to the next afternoon.
When he walked out to his truck, he stopped. Somebody had tied Kayla's veil to his side mirror, a long white cloud of tulle snapping and floating in the Wyoming wind.
He left it there all the way to Salt Lake.