The Man I Hit On My Wedding Day

The Ambulance

The EMT was a woman named Marcy with gray in her braid and forearms like a farrier’s. She and her partner had him collared and on a board in about four minutes. She asked me who I was to him.

“I’m the one who hit him,” I said.

She looked at the dress. She looked at the ribbon on the car. She looked at the phone, still face down on the asphalt, buzzing itself in a slow circle.

“You riding or following?” she said.

It was not a hard question, and that surprised me. I had thought it would be.

“Riding,” I said.

I left the phone where it was. Hank told me later he picked it up, turned it off, and put it in the register drawer at the hardware store, and that it had rung twenty-three times before he found the button.

There is not much room in the back of an ambulance for a wedding dress. Marcy had me sit on the bench seat and gather the skirt up in my lap like laundry. The man was awake by then, strapped down, squinting at the ceiling lights. She asked him his name.

“Luke Callahan.”

She asked him what day it was. He said Saturday. She asked him who the president was, and he got that right too, and then she asked what he did for a living, and he said, “I’m a veterinarian. I took over Doc Brannigan’s practice three weeks ago.”

I made a small sound. Marcy looked at me.

“I worked for Doc Brannigan for seven years,” I said. “I was his tech. I quit in March.”

Luke Callahan turned his eyes toward me as far as the collar would let him.

“You’re Tessa,” he said. “He talks about you all the time. He said you could find a vein on a barn cat in the dark.” He took a careful breath, and winced. “He didn’t mention you’d be the one to break me in.”

“I am so sorry,” I said. “I looked at my phone. It was my fault. All of it was my fault, and I am so sorry.”

He was quiet for a second.

“Were you headed somewhere?” he said.

“I was getting married at eleven.”

He looked at the dress again, and then at me.

“Was,” he said. Not a question. Just the one word, turned over once, and set back down.

I did not answer him. I did not know the answer yet. But I noticed I had said it that way, and so had he.