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If you bump into Kathy Petrucelli, expect the biggest smile you’ve ever seen.
She and her husband, Terry, are happy to be alive.
They were at that race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway Saturday night — and on that bridge shortly before it collapsed Saturday night, injuring 107 people, some of them seriously.
“We decided to leave a little bit early,” she says, “probably 10 to 15 minutes before the race was over, so we went across that bridge. Probably only one other couple was on it then. We had parked way down the hill. It was quite a walk. We got in our car and had to go under 29 — it was like a little trestle kind of road — and circle back around to head towards home.
“And we had gone not even an eighth of a mile, and we started seeing all these ambulances and then police cars, and Terry said, ‘Something has happened. I hope there wasn’t a wreck.’ There were 15 or 20. We couldn’t imagine what it was.
“But we managed to go all the way through Concord without stopping at a single light, and when we got home, our daughter, Heather, was here by herself. She had rented a movie, so she didn’t have the TV on. If she had seen it, I think she would have gotten in her car and tried to get there.
“I said, ‘Heather, let’s turn the TV on ...’”
And none of them could believe what they were looking at. And what they’d just missed.
“I feel like we have a little ray of sunshine over our heads. I said, ‘Thank you, Lord. I love you big time.’”
They noticed nothing amiss when they walked across the bridge and never gave it a second thought.
But they have since.
“We don’t normally go to races,” Kathy said. They attended the Winston night race virtually by default.
“Our niece in Pennsylvania has a boyfriend whose sister got tickets but couldn’t come down for the race. We took them when they came down a couple of years ago. That was the only time we’d been to a race there. So we said we’d try to sell the tickets for them.”
But the sale fizzled at the last minute.
“And Terry said rather than waste them, we’d just go to the race.”
When they found out what happened, she turned to him again.
“What does this mean?” she wanted to know. “We’ve got to figure out the greater meaning.”
“I think it means we’re extremely lucky,” he said.
They watched reports on television until about 2 in the morning, wondering if the woman being pushed across in a wheelchair when they went in was on the bridge when it collapsed.
“She wouldn’t have had a chance if she had been there at the end of the race.”
Kathy has spent this morning thinking about what she’s got to do now.
“I’ve been putting off trying to get my book published. Now I’m going to try.”
She can’t buy that Excalibur sports car she wants. It costs too much. But she can get a picture of it maybe.
“And I’m not going to be mean to anybody. I’m going to give everybody the biggest smile you’ve ever seen.”
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