The Man I Hit On My Wedding Day

The Chair

A broken left collarbone, two cracked ribs, a concussion, and nine stitches I had not even seen, on the back of his arm, where it met the road. That is what I did to Luke Callahan with a text message.

A deputy named Oakes took my statement in the hallway outside the emergency room. I stood there in a torn wedding dress with road grit on my knees and told him all of it. That I was going about fifteen. That the crosswalk was marked. That I had looked down at my phone to read a text and looked up too late.

He stopped writing. “You understand you don’t have to tell me that last part.”

“I understand,” I said. “Write it down.”

He wrote it down. He gave me a citation for inattentive driving and failure to yield to a pedestrian, and told me there would be a court date, and I folded it and held it, because a wedding dress does not have a pocket.

Luke had no one in Harlow. His mother was in Montana, and his sister was in Spokane, and the nurse said someone needed to wake him every two hours through the night because of the concussion. I said I would do it. The nurse looked at the dress the same way everyone had been looking at the dress.

“Honey,” she said, “isn’t somebody waiting on you?”

“Yes,” I said. “They can wait.”

They gave him a room on the second floor with a west window. I pulled the chair up close to the bed, because that is how you sit with an animal coming out from under, close enough that they can smell you and know they are not alone. I woke him at one, and at three. Each time he told me his name and the day and then asked if I was still wearing it.

“Still wearing it,” I said.

“Good,” he said, and went back under.

Somewhere after three o’clock, with the sun coming low and gold through that window, I put my head down on the edge of the mattress just to rest my eyes. I had been awake since four in the morning to get my hair done.

I woke up because a hand had closed around mine.

I lifted my head. He was propped up against the pillows with his arm in a navy sling and a little bandage on his temple, and he was looking at me. Not the way people had been looking at me all day, at the dress, at the spectacle of it. He was just looking at me.

Neither of us said anything. I felt my own face start to smile before I gave it permission, and I watched his do the same.

I had been engaged for fourteen months, and nobody had looked at me like that in any one of them.