Annika stood in front of the muted television, holding her phone, and her hands were shaking. Craig told her to sit down, the game was on. She did not sit down.
She told the living room that in the blizzard of 2023 she was riding in the back of an ambulance on Skyline Parkway, a nursing student doing a ride-along, when the rig got stuck in the snow on the hill above Lake Superior. There was a woman in labor on the stretcher. The baby was coming, the roads were a whiteout, and the ambulance could not move. She said she had never been so scared in her life.
Then, out of the dark and the blowing snow, a city snowplow came up the hill and cut a clean path all the way down to St Marys, slow and steady, so the ambulance could follow it through. They made it with minutes to spare. The woman and the baby both lived.
Annika had never seen the plow drivers face that night. But she had been staring at Nils across the living room all evening, because something about him was familiar, and halfway through the game it came to her where she had heard that calm voice before. On the radio that night, the dispatcher had said the drivers name. Nils.
He gets paid to drive around in circles all night, Craig had said. One of those circles put a newborn in her mothers arms alive.
She turned her phone around. It was a photo a grateful family had sent to the ambulance crew a year later, a little girl in a snowsuit, almost two years old now, the baby from that night.
Annika looked at her own father and said, Dad, the man you just offered a sales job to drove through a blizzard so that baby could be born. I was there. I watched him do it.
The half of the room that had laughed went quiet, and the half that had looked at the floor finally looked up. Craig set his Leinenkugel down on the coffee table and did not pick it back up.
Nils just reached for the cheese curds and said, go Pack, Uncle Craig. Then he went and sat with Annika and asked, very quietly, if the baby was doing well. She said yes. He said, good, and that was all he needed.