The Man I Hit On My Wedding Day

The Bill

I did get the bill. It came by certified mail nine days later on Vance Implement letterhead: $38,460, itemized, down to the ice sculpture. My mother read it at her kitchen table, took off her glasses, and said, “Well. Cheaper than a divorce.”

I want to be honest about that summer, because it was not a movie.

Harlow picked sides, and for a while most of them were not mine. The Vances employ a quarter of the town. The story that went around the co-op and the beauty shop was that Tessa Moran ran a man down drunk on champagne and then left Preston at the altar for him. I was not drunk. I’d had half a piece of toast. But you cannot go door to door with a breathalyzer.

I sent back every gift. One hundred and thirty-one of them, each with a note in my own hand. It took me two weeks and most of a box of pens.

I went to court in July in a navy dress and pleaded guilty to both citations. The judge asked if I had anything to say, and I said only that Dr. Callahan had been in a marked crosswalk and had done nothing wrong, and that I would like that on the record, because I had heard it told otherwise. I paid the fine. I took the driving course, in a room at the library with four teenagers.

And I paid Luke’s hospital deductible out of the savings I had put away for a honeymoon in Maine. He argued with me about it for a week. I won, because I pointed out that he could not sign a check with a broken collarbone anyway, and he laughed so hard he had to hold his ribs.

Six Weeks Of Driving

A large-animal vet who cannot lift his left arm and is not allowed to drive is not much use to a county full of cattle.

I knew that before he did. So the Monday after he came home, I pulled into the gravel lot at the clinic at six in the morning in the Cadillac, with a thermos, and sat there until he came out on the step in a sling and a wrinkled shirt he had clearly buttoned one-handed.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“You’ve got a herd check at the Lindholm place at seven,” I said. “Doc’s old appointment book hasn’t changed in thirty years. Get in.”

He looked at the car for a while. At the hood.

“Is this the same one?”

“Same one.”

“You’re asking me to get into the car that hit me.”

“I’m asking you to get in on the inside this time,” I said. “It’s much nicer.”

He got in.

I drove him for six weeks. Every farm call, every dawn, every midnight calving. I told myself it was restitution, and for the first week it was. I carried his bag. I ran the chute. I held the heads, and filled the syringes, and when a heifer at the Petersons’ went down with a breech calf at one in the morning, it was my arm that went in, because his could not, with him kneeling in the straw beside me talking me through it in a low, steady voice.

The calf came out slick and breathing. I sat back on my heels, soaked to the shoulder, laughing, and I looked over and he was not watching the calf.

“There she is,” he said.

“There who is?”