The Slap Two Days After Our Wedding

The flowers from our reception were still alive on my kitchen counter when my husband’s hand caught the side of my face hard enough to turn my head. Forty eight hours. That was the whole distance between the two of us dancing our first dance in front of a hundred and ten people who loved us, and him standing over me in our kitchen while I bled a little at the corner of my mouth and a plate of chicken and green beans lay shattered between our shoes.

I am going to tell this slowly, because I think the slowness is the only way anybody who hasn’t lived it will understand how a person ends up in that kitchen in the first place.

My name is Lauren. I grew up in Marrow Creek, Kansas, a town small enough that everybody at the grocery store already knows what you’re buying before you set it on the belt. My mother died when I was nineteen, a bad year that taught me early how fast a life can tilt sideways, and after that it was just me and my father, Mike, in the house I grew up in. Mike worked thirty one years at the co-op elevator before his knees gave out and he took an early retirement he never once complained about. He is the kind of man who fixes things quietly and says very little, and when he does say something, people in Marrow Creek tend to listen, because he has never once in his life said a word he didn’t mean.

I met Dustin at a fundraiser for the volunteer fire department, of all places. He was thirty one, ran his family’s construction company, Lang Builders, the kind of business that had poured half the driveways and framed half the garages in three counties. He was handsome in an easy, unhurried way, the kind of man who remembered your coffee order the second time he saw you and held doors without making a show of it. He made me laugh within ten minutes of meeting him, and within a year he had asked my father for permission to marry me, the old fashioned way, sitting across our kitchen table with his hat in his lap.

I want to be fair to the man I thought I was marrying, because that man was real too, or real enough. He brought my father a bottle of good bourbon that night and thanked him for raising a woman like me. He cried a little at the rehearsal dinner. None of that was fake. I think the truth is more complicated and more uncomfortable than fake, which is that a person can be truly tender in some rooms and truly cruel in others, and you do not find out which room you live in until the wedding is behind you and there is no more performance left to keep up. I have had a long time to sit with that idea since, turning it over on quiet evenings, and I still have not found a tidier way to say it.