The Man I Hit On My Wedding Day

The Phone Call

He was lying on his back beside the crosswalk stripe with his eyes closed. There was a scrape on his left temple, not deep, already beading red. One of his earbuds had landed on the asphalt beside his head, still playing something tinny that I could not make out.

I went down on my knees next to him. I heard the hem of my dress tear on the road and I did not care. Seven years in a vet clinic teaches you a few things that carry over. I did not move his neck. I put my palm flat on his chest and felt it rise. I counted. I watched his color.

I called 911 with my other hand. The dispatcher was Jeanie Pruitt, who I went to school with, and she said the ambulance was six minutes out from the county barn and to stay right there and keep talking to him.

I had not even lowered the phone when it rang again in my hand.

Preston.

I answered because I thought, God help me, that he was calling because someone had told him. Harlow is a small town. I thought he was calling to say, I’m coming, stay there, is he breathing, are you hurt.

“Where are you?” he said. “Pastor Dean is standing at the front of the church looking at his watch.”

“Preston, I hit someone.” My voice did not sound like mine. “In front of the hardware store. A man. He was jogging and I hit him with the car. He’s on the ground. He’s not waking up.”

There was a pause. I could hear the organ behind him, playing the slow thing they play while people are still finding their seats.

And then my fiancé said the thirteen words I will hear for the rest of my life.

“Is the car okay? Then get in it and drive, Tessa. Leave him.”

I did not say anything. I could not find a single word.

He kept going, lower, the way he talked when he was being reasonable. “Somebody else will call it in. Somebody always does. There are two hundred people sitting in that church, and my mother is watching the door. You can deal with all of that Monday. Get in the car.”

I looked down at the man on the road. He had dark hair, wet at the temples, and a day or two of stubble, and a face that would have stopped me in a grocery store on any other day of my life. His chest was going up and down under my hand. He had been out for a run on a Saturday morning. That was all he had done.

I took the phone away from my ear and looked at it. Preston was still talking. I could hear the small shape of his voice.

I set the phone face down on the asphalt.

I put both hands on the stranger’s chest, and I said, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. The ambulance is coming. I’m right here.”

I said it maybe ten times. I do not know how long it was. Long enough for Hank from the hardware store to come out with a moving blanket and stand there holding it. Long enough for a sprinkler across the street to click around twice.

Then the man’s face moved.

His eyes came open a crack, blue, and they did not focus right away. He squinted up past me at the sky. Then he found me. The lace. The pearl earrings. The dress pooled around both of us on Main Street.

One corner of his mouth went up.

“Nice dress,” he said.

I laughed. It came out of me like a hiccup, with tears all through it, right there on my knees in the road. I have never in my life laughed at a worse moment, and I have never been more grateful for anything than I was for those two words.

“I hit you with my car,” I told him.

“I gathered,” he said. He laid his hand over mine on his chest, and for a second neither of us looked away. “Don’t move,” I told him. “Please don’t move.” He closed his eyes again, still half smiling.