The Daughter Who Cleans Floors

I had the pry bar from the van in my right hand and the belt in my left. I could not cut the webbing with the bar. So I shoved it into the buckle and levered, and the buckle gave a little, then not at all.

“Keep talking to me,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Ira,” he said.

“All right, Ira. I need you to hold still.”

The glass broke when the truck shifted. The passenger window, the one I had my left hand braced against. It broke under my palm, and I felt the long cold drag of it across my hand, from the base of my finger to the heel of my palm. I did not feel pain yet. I felt the warm run of blood and a kind of dull surprise.

I did not let go of the belt.

The buckle released.

I got him out by the collar of his suit jacket, across the tilted seat, with the whole truck groaning under us. On the pavement I knelt beside him and pressed my bleeding hand flat against the front of his white shirt because I did not know where else to put it. I called 911, put my work jacket under his head, and kept talking until I heard sirens on the far side of the water.

Behind us the truck slid the rest of the way into the creek, and the sound of it was one I will hear for the rest of my life.

Then I left. The ambulance was coming, and I had a shift at five, and a long lifetime’s habit of not being the person anyone thanked.

So I walked to my van, and I drove home with my left hand wrapped in a work glove, and I stood at my kitchen sink, and I washed the cut with dish soap. It was long and deep. It should have had stitches. I closed it with butterfly strips and a tube of superglue, wrapped it in gauze, and at five the next morning I went to work.

It healed into a pale curved scar.

My father noticed the scar once, at Thanksgiving, and said, “What’d you do, cut yourself on a mop?” and laughed, and I laughed, and that was the end of the conversation about my left hand.

And I went back to my life.