The Truck That Cost Them The House

The waiting room

The next clear memory I have is the emergency room at the hospital in Poplar Bluff, forty minutes up the highway, fluorescent lights, the particular sharp smell of antiseptic that gets into the back of your throat and stays there. A nurse was pressing a folded gauze pad above my eyebrow and asking, gently, whether there was anyone besides my family she should call.

I told her there wasn’t, not yet, because I could not think past the next five minutes.

They gave me four stitches above my eyebrow and wrapped my left wrist, which had taken the worst of the fall against the cabinet, sprained but not broken, the doctor said, though it would ache for a month either way. My hands would not stop shaking the entire time, not from the pain so much as from trying to hold two conflicting facts in my head at once: that this was my family, and that this had actually happened.

I texted my boyfriend, Jesse, from the exam bed, one line, something like “at the ER, don’t panic, I’m okay.” He works nights at the grain elevator outside town and had just laid down when the message came through, and he was there inside of thirty minutes, still in his work boots, badge clipped to his shirt like he’d walked straight off the floor. He did not ask me a single question I wasn’t ready to answer. He just pulled a chair up next to the bed, took my good hand, and sat there while the nurse finished with my wrist, and having one person in that building who was simply, uncomplicatedly on my side made it possible to keep breathing at a normal speed again.

Out in the waiting room, through the glass, I could see my parents sitting together, calm, almost pleasant, like they were waiting on a prescription refill instead of sitting forty feet from their own daughter’s hospital bed. My mother had that manila folder open across her knees. When a nurse walked past, my father asked her, politely, how much longer it would be, like the whole evening was simply running behind schedule.