That’s all I’ve ever told anybody.
Ellie was four. She was in the back seat. She lived.
I don’t talk about that night. Not to anybody. Not to my pastor, not to my neighbors, not to the grief counselor the hospital made me see for six weeks. I put it in a box in my heart and I nailed the lid shut.
I’ll tell you why later.
We live in the old house on Pickett Street in Harlan, Missouri. The house where my husband, Hank, and I spent forty-one years of our married life. A little white two-story with green shutters and a front porch that sags in the middle like a tired horse.
Hank built that porch in 1979. He was always going to fix the sag. He died in 2019 before he got around to it. Heart attack, in the garden, pulling weeds. I found him lying between the tomato plants with his hat still on.
