The Day Rate My Sister Charged
I counted the money onto my own kitchen table with my right hand, because my left arm was strapped against my ribs in a navy sling and would be for weeks.
Twenty-dollar bills, one at a time. The October sun came in low through the window over the sink and lay across the table like it was trying to help me keep my place.
The walker the hospital sent home with me stood beside my chair. I had been home about an hour. I still smelled like hospital soap and the inside of Luke’s truck.
My sister Krista stood on the other side of the table in her black puffer vest with her hands flat on the table. She had not sat down. She did not look like she planned to.
On the floor between us, my son Rhett was running his toy trucks along the seam of the linoleum, making little engine sounds under his breath. He is three. He had held on to my leg since the minute I came through the door.
“Twenty, forty, sixty,” I said, not loud. Just loud enough that we both had to hear every one.
Krista shifted her weight. “Whitney, you don’t have to do this right now.”
“I do,” I said. “I want to do it while I’m sitting up. I don’t know how long that’s going to last today.”
That was true. My pelvis had been cracked in two places, and sitting in a kitchen chair felt like sitting on a fence rail with somebody kicking it. But I kept counting.
Nine days. That was how long I had been in intensive care at the hospital in Lafayette. Nine days, and a hundred and fifty dollars for each one, and here it all was.
The Wreck
I work the scale office at the elevator in our town, a little west of Lafayette, in the kind of country where the corn and beans run right up to the backyards and the school buses wait on combines in the fall.
Most of the year I weigh trucks, print tickets and answer the phone. At harvest I drive grain truck for Dale Kessler, who farms about eleven hundred acres south of town and has never once been late with my check.
I like driving truck. I have since I was nineteen. There is something about bringing in a full load, the bed heaped gold, that makes me feel like I am part of the reason the whole county eats.
That Saturday it had rained the night before, not a lot, just enough. I was coming back from the field on a gravel county road with a full load of corn, a little under four hundred bushels, in Dale’s old tandem.
A pickup came over the rise toward me in the middle of the road. I moved right to give him room. The shoulder looked solid. It was not. The ditch had been cut deep that summer and the rain had softened the edge.
I felt the right side of the truck drop, and then the whole world tipped over slow, the way a bad dream does, and the corn came through the cab window like water.
I do not remember much after that. The man in the pickup was a retired mail carrier named Ron, and he called 911 and stayed with me and held my good hand through the broken windshield until the fire department got there.
They flew me to Lafayette. Broken left arm, two places. Cracked pelvis. Three broken ribs and a collapsed lung that needed a chest tube. A bruised spleen they watched like a hawk for four days.
Luke got there before the helicopter did. He drove the whole way with his welding shop shirt still on and burn holes in the sleeves, and the nurses told me later he would not sit down for three hours.