The Night the Whole Town Tipped Back
A Year Before I Was Ready
I will not pretend the year after that was anything but hard in ways I still do not have full language for. Learning to walk on a prosthetic is not like the movies make it look. There is no single triumphant montage. There is a socket that never quite fits right at first, and phantom pain in a foot that is not there anymore, and a physical therapist at the clinic in Wausau who made me cry in a good way exactly once and in a frustrated way about forty times.
There is also, if you are lucky, a town that does not let you fall through the cracks while you figure it out.
Stan held my job for me. Not a version of it, not a lesser version behind the register, the actual floor job, the one I have now, waiting for the day I could stand a full shift again. Chuck and half the Friday regulars organized meal drop offs for three months without ever once making it feel like charity. Somebody, to this day I am not entirely sure who, paid off the balance on my hospital bill that insurance did not cover, and would not let the billing office tell me a name.
Small towns get made fun of for a lot of things. I will defend mine with my last breath.
A year after the fire, once the paperwork cleared and the home study was done and a caseworker who had watched the whole thing unfold personally vouched for me twice, I adopted that little girl.
She calls me Mom now. She has for a while.
She is eight years old, missing her front teeth on a schedule entirely of her own choosing, and she thinks my prosthetic leg is the single coolest thing about me, which on the hard days is doing more work than she will ever know.
Everything I do, every double shift, every ache, is for her.
Back on the Floor
I went back to full shifts at Kessler’s about fourteen months ago. Stan eased me in slow, short sections at first, more sitting breaks in the office than either of us wanted to admit out loud. By this past winter I was back to full Friday nights, same as before, just with a different gait and a leg that talks to the hardwood when the room gets quiet enough to hear it.
Most people do not even notice the sound. Most of the ones who do notice are kind about it, or at least mind their own business, because that is what you do in a town where somebody’s difficult season this year might be somebody’s ordinary Tuesday next year.
Maureen was not from Birch Lake.
I found that out later. She was up from somewhere near Milwaukee, visiting a cousin, the kind of visitor who treats a small town supper club like it exists specifically to fall short of her standards. I did not know any of that yet when she sat down at table six on a Friday in early September, the dining room already three quarters full, my daughter doing spelling words at Stan’s desk in the back office because our regular sitter had called in sick at four o’clock.
I brought table six their water and their relish tray same as I do fifty other tables every Friday.
That is when I heard it. The click.
Small, mechanical, right on the warped board by the fryer line.
Maureen turned all the way around in her seat.