PART 2 — THE SLING
The teenage girl with the scar on her chin pushed her chair back and unfolded something in her lap, an old blue arm sling, the kind they hand you at the emergency room.
Judge, she said, looking straight at Richard, since you mentioned the sign. She held the sling up so the whole anniversary table could see it. I was eight years old. That car was doing fifty. And the lady who pushed me out of the way broke her own arm doing it.
Six years ago, the girl told the room, she had stepped off the curb at her crossing when a car came around the corner far too fast, not slowing for the sign, not slowing for the children. She froze in the middle of the street.
The crossing guard did not freeze. She dropped her stop sign and threw herself into the road, shoved the little girl clear, and took the fall herself. The car clipped her. She shattered her arm. The little girl walked away with a scar on her chin and her whole life ahead of her.
The woman Richard called a hobbyist standing in the street had broken her own arm throwing a child out of the path of a speeding car.
Peggy, my wife of forty years, had never made a thing of it. She wore that cast all summer and told everyone she tripped. Only the family of the little girl knew the truth, and they had been waiting for the right moment to tell it.
Richards wife had invited them, not knowing the whole story herself.
Minutes before, Richard, the county judge, had raised his merlot and said, sixty-four and still standing in the street holding a sign, my clerk makes more than you.
The judge set his glass down and could not find a word. His own clerk, whatever she makes, has never once stepped in front of a car for a child.
Peggy just smiled and cut the cake, the way she had smiled through his joke. Then the girl with the scar came around the table and hugged my wife, and the whole room was crying, and I have never in forty years been prouder of the woman I married.