The Man I Hit On My Wedding Day

“It was,” Luke agreed. “Here’s my answer, since half the town’s wondered what the jogger thinks. She hit me. She told the deputy it was her fault before he asked. She sat up all night to keep me alive, she paid my bill, and she drove me to every farm in this county for six weeks with her arm up inside other people’s cattle.” He folded the letter in half. “And the man she was supposed to marry told her to leave me lying in the road so the caterers wouldn’t have to hold lunch. I heard that part myself. I wasn’t as far under as I looked.”

Nobody in that cafe moved.

I had not known that. All that time, I had not known he heard it.

Luke slid the letter down the counter. It stopped by Preston’s coffee.

“The only thing that woman ever took from me was one Saturday,” he said. “I’d like to give her the rest of them. If she wants them.”

Then he turned around on the stool and looked at me, in front of Hank from the hardware store and Jeanie Pruitt and the Lindholms and Pastor Dean with a fork halfway to his mouth, and I understood that he was asking.

I have been asked two questions like that in my life. The first one came with a ring his mother picked and a room full of people I was meant to impress. The second came over a slice of pie at the Wheatland Cafe with my hair in a ponytail and iodine on my wrist.

“I want them,” I said.

Preston left a twenty on the counter and walked out. The bill for the wedding was quietly withdrawn two weeks later. I heard that his own father told him to let it lie, that it was bad for tractor sales. The story at the beauty shop changed after that. Stories do, once enough people have heard the true part.

The Porch

Luke bought the old Sorensen farmhouse that fall, the white one on the county road with forty acres of wheat running up to the porch.

The first evening I went out there, the sun was going down through the field and everything was the color of honey. We sat on the front steps. I had on a sundress and my old jean jacket, and he had on a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and for a long while we just sat with our shoulders touching and laughed about the Peterson calf, which they had named Caddy.

Then he stopped laughing, and put his hand on my cheek, and tucked my hair back behind my ear.

“I’ve been wanting to do this since about ten forty-two on a Saturday in June,” he said.

“You were unconscious at ten forty-two.”

“I came around quick.”

That was our first kiss. On his porch, at sundown, five months after I broke his collarbone. Afterward he rested his forehead against mine and neither of us opened our eyes for a while.