The Daughter My Family Wrote Off

The boy’s mother arrived before the ambulance did, having heard the crash from her own porch a quarter mile down, and the next twenty minutes were a blur of flashing lights and the deputy’s careful, methodical questions, and Wilna sitting on the porch steps with a blanket someone had produced from somewhere, sobering fast into the understanding that the version of that night where I quietly absorbed the blame had closed the moment she opened her mouth.

I did not press for anything beyond the truth. That has never been how I operate, in a courtroom or out of one. Wilna was charged, in the weeks that followed, with driving under the influence, leaving the scene of an accident, and reckless endangerment, all of it handled two counties over by a judge who had never heard of the Prescotts and did not care whose wedding was on the calendar. She lost her license for a year. She did community service at the hospital where the boy spent two nights, restocking supply closets under the supervision of a nurse who, I heard later, made sure Wilna understood exactly what a fractured wrist looked like on an X-ray.

Her fiancé’s mother did, in fact, have opinions about all of it. The wedding did not happen in six weeks. It happened four months later than planned, smaller than planned, and without the write-up in the county paper my mother had been counting on. Wilna is still married to him now. I hope they’re happy. I mean that plainly, without irony; grudges are heavy things and I try not to carry more of them than a case requires.