The Fiance Who Never Came

Jenny was there. She had driven three hours from Eau Claire the night of the crash and she did not go home for eleven days. She slept in that vinyl chair. She washed her face in the family bathroom down the hall with the pink soap. She learned the names of my nurses and the names of their kids. When I was awake she read me the farm report out of the paper because she knew the sound of hog prices put me to sleep better than anything the hospital could hang on a pole.

My mother was there. Carol Dahl is seventy-one and does not drive at night anymore, so she rode in with Jenny and she sat on the other side of the bed with her rosary going through her fingers like she was milking it. My mother is not a woman who cries where you can see her. She cried where I could see her.

And Dawn was there. Dawn was the day nurse on my side of the ICU, a wide, calm woman about fifty with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice like a hand on your shoulder. I did not know then that Dawn was going to be the one who told me the truth. I just knew that when she came on at seven in the morning the room got steadier, and that she talked to me like I was a person and not a chart, and that she called me “honey” in a way that did not make me feel small.

Here is who else was there, in their own way.

Marcy closed the diner for two hours on the day of the crash, which she had not done since her husband’s funeral, and she drove the whole early-shift crew up to sit in the waiting room. They could not come back to the ICU, only family could, but they sat out there in their aprons with the ketchup still on them and they waited to hear if I would live. Marcy took my shifts off the board and told the other girls she would pay me anyway, which she could not afford and did.

Earl Haas, who farms the quarter section next to my grandmother’s old place and who I have known since I was in a car seat, came by my house that first night with his tractor and plowed my drive so the ambulance people and then Jenny could get in and out. Then he did it every storm for the rest of the winter. He fed Boone. He let Boone sleep in his own kitchen when the house got cold, and he never once mentioned it to me, I found out from his wife months later.

The Lutheran ladies, who are not even my church, filled my freezer. The Catholics, who are, filled Jenny’s trunk. Somebody I still have not identified mowed the stubble off my yard in the spring and left a note that said only “glad you’re still with us.” The town I had lived in my whole life, that I sometimes thought of as small in the mean way people mean that word, turned out to be exactly as big as I needed it to be, at the exact moment I needed it.