The Man I Hit On My Wedding Day

How I Got To That Crosswalk

I want to tell you about Preston Vance, because otherwise you will wonder why a grown woman would look down at a phone in a crosswalk on her wedding day, and the answer is that for two years I had been trained to.

The Vances own the implement dealership in Harlow and the one in the next county over, and they own a good piece of the bank besides. Preston was thirty-four, tall, clean, and certain. He had a way of resting his hand on the back of my neck in public that people thought was sweet. I thought it was sweet too, at first.

I was a veterinary technician when we met. I worked for old Doc Brannigan for seven years, holding dogs still and pulling calves at two in the morning and going home with my boots smelling like a barn. I loved it. Six months after we got engaged, Preston said the smell followed me into his truck, and that a Vance wife did not need a job where she came home with blood under her nails. He said it kindly. He said most things kindly. I gave my notice in March.

It was like that with everything. He never shouted. He adjusted.

He adjusted the guest list until two hundred and twelve people were coming and I knew about forty of them. He adjusted the dress, in the sense that his mother, Lorraine, came to my second fitting and suggested sleeves. He adjusted the limousine too. There was one, and three days before the wedding it was decided that it would carry the groom’s party from the Vance house, because there were more of them, and that I could surely find my own way four blocks to the church.

My father has been gone since I was nineteen. So I said I would drive myself in my Grandpa Emmett’s Cadillac, which had sat under a tarp in my mother’s machine shed for eleven years, and which Grandpa used to say was the only thing he ever owned that never once let him down. My mother washed it by hand and tied the ribbon on. That car was my something old.

Preston said it was fine, as long as I parked it behind the church where the photographer would not get it in the shots.

I am not telling you this so you will feel sorry for me. I said yes to all of it. I am telling you because at 10:41 that morning I was a woman who had learned that when Preston’s name lit up a screen, you looked. Right then. Wherever you were.

And a man I had never met paid for that lesson with his collarbone.