I wired $10,000 to my mother’s account that afternoon. The wedding fund was decimated, leaving us with a little over two thousand dollars. But my father was going to live.
That night, Caleb kissed my forehead. “I’ll pick up some extra shifts,” he said. “There’s a commercial tower going up downtown. The contractor pays time-and-a-half for the night crew to beat the weather.”
“It’s dangerous at night,” I whispered.
“I’m careful,” he smiled. “We’re going to get our porch, Tori. I promise.”
Three days later, my phone rang while I was charting a patient’s vitals. It wasn’t my mother. It was the site manager from the downtown tower project. A commercial scaffold had failed. A cable that inspection paperwork swore was sound had snapped in the biting wind.
Caleb Brand, thirty-one years old, fell four stories into the dark. He was gone before the ambulance reached the second traffic light.
I didn’t scream. I remember staring at the blank screen of the hospital computer, watching the cursor blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Measuring the exact seconds of my life ending.
My family did not come to the funeral. Seven hours is just too far right now, honey, my mother texted. With your father’s recovery and all. We’ll send flowers.
They sent cheap carnations.
Two days after burying the man I loved, hollowed out and functioning purely on muscle memory, I called my brother Danny. I just needed to hear a voice from home.
