The Tow Girl and the Icy Ditch

“Not her,” Tiffany said, the second my red wrecker came over the rise on Highway 59. “Anybody but her. I’ll wait for somebody else.”

She said it loud enough for me to hear it through the glass with the heater running.

She was standing on the shoulder in a pink puffer coat with her arms crossed tight, the way she always stood when she saw me.

Behind her, in the bar ditch, a white four-horse slant trailer was leaning so far over I could see the underside of its floor.

A palomino had his head pressed to the front window, and his eyes were showing white all the way around.

I knew that horse. Everybody who went to the winter shows in southeast Kansas knew that horse.

He was the one she ran in the barrels, the one she posted pictures of, the one she called her whole heart.

I put the truck in neutral and set the brakes and sat there for maybe three seconds. That was all the time I gave her words.

Then I got out, because there were four animals in that trailer and none of them had ever called me anything.

My name is Jess Oberle. I am 34 years old, and I run one heavy wrecker and one rollback out of a steel building on a gravel road east of Parsons, Kansas.

I have done that for four years, and I drove for somebody else for nine years before that.

At every rodeo and every indoor show from Coffeyville to Fort Scott, Tiffany Grote calls me the tow girl.

She doesn’t say it to my face, exactly. She says it to whoever is standing next to her, a little louder than she needs to.

“Watch your truck,” she’ll say, when I walk past the concession stand with a coffee.

Then comes the rest of it. “The tow girl’s here. Somebody’s getting hooked.” And the women around her laugh, because it is easier to laugh than to not.

Tiffany is 32 and married to my ex-husband, Brandon Grote, who is 37. They have been married three years.

Brandon and I were married seven and divorced four, and there were no children, which I used to be sorry about and mostly am not anymore.

The divorce was not a war. It was two people who wanted different things and finally said so at a kitchen table.

Brandon kept the house in town because his name was on it first. I kept my pickup, my tools and my savings account.

That savings account is the part Tiffany gets wrong, every time she tells it. She tells people Brandon bought me my wrecker in the divorce.

She tells them he felt sorry for me and set me up in a little business so I’d have something.

He didn’t. I bought that wrecker used, out of Missouri, for $38,000.

I paid for it with nine years of rollback wages I’d squirreled away and a bank note I still pay on the fifth of every month.

I have never once corrected her in public. You don’t win anything arguing in a sale barn parking lot.

People believe what they want, and the ones who matter, the ones who call me at two in the morning, already know who pays my note.