The Lunch He Chose Over Me

There had been so many. Charlene Tuttle had moved back to Ashford about fourteen months before, after her divorce down in the city fell apart. She had grown up two grades behind Dale, and the first month she was back he ran into her at the co-op and, in his telling, she just needed somebody to talk to. Somebody who understood the town, who remembered her people. That was all.

Then it was Charlene’s lawyer trouble. Charlene’s nerves. Charlene’s ex and the truck and the storage unit. Charlene needing a man to go with her to look at a used car so the salesman would not cheat her. Charlene calling at supper. Charlene calling at nine at night, and Dale walking out to the porch to take it where I could not hear.

And always, every single week, Thursday lunch. Somehow my husband, who could not find a free hour to take me to see my sister two counties over, had three hours clear every Thursday, regular as church.

Before I left for my shift that morning, I reminded him about the dinner that night. Fairview County Memorial was giving me my pin for twenty-five years in the hospital pharmacy. Twenty-five years counting pills and catching the doctors’ bad handwriting and standing at that counter while half the town came through with their heart medicine and their grandbabies’ antibiotics. There was a dinner in the hospital’s community room, sheet cake and a little speech and a pin shaped like the hospital’s oak-tree logo. I had asked Dale to be there.

He said he would try.

I already knew what “I’ll try” meant in our house. It meant no. It meant something would come up, and the something would have a name, and the name was Charlene.

The stop sign out on County Road 9

I worked late that day. There was a mix-up with a delivery and I stayed to sort it, because that is the kind of thing I did, staying to fix what was not mine to fix. By the time I pulled out of the hospital lot the rain had started, that thin cold October rain that makes the county roads shine like something poured.

I was thinking about Dale the whole drive. Wondering if he would actually be at the dinner, or if I would stand up there and get my pin with the chair beside me empty and everybody in that community room knowing exactly why. I was rehearsing how I would smile through it. I have always been good at smiling through it.

I did not see the pickup until it was already in the intersection.

He ran the stop sign at County Road 9 and the old highway. A young fellow, it turned out, texting, doing better than fifty. He caught me on the driver’s side. I remember the sound more than anything. Metal does not crunch the way it does in the movies. It screams. Glass came apart into a spray of little green cubes and the world turned a half circle and my head hit something and then it was very quiet, except the radio was still playing. Some old Alan Jackson song, calm as you please, like nothing in the world had happened, while I sat there with my arm wrong and warmth running down the side of my face.

The Ferris boy from the farm on the corner was the first one to me. He had heard it from his barn. He held an umbrella over the broken window and kept saying, “Miss Ruth, Miss Ruth, don’t move, they’re coming,” and I kept trying to tell him I was fine, I had somewhere to be, somebody needed to call Dale.

That is the thing I keep coming back to. Bleeding in a wrecked car in the rain, and my first clear thought was that somebody needed to call my husband so he would not worry.