The Lake House He Thought He Kept

My Brother Joe’s Place

My brother Joe was waiting in the parking lot with his truck running. He did not ask me a single question. He set my suitcase in the truck bed next to a sack of feed corn he had picked up in town, and he drove me twenty minutes out the county road to the small farm he and his wife, Lucas, have kept going since their own kids moved out, mostly chickens and a big garden and eleven acres of hay he leases out to a neighbor.

Lucas had coffee on before we had our coats off. She did not ask questions either. She just put a plate of something warm in front of me and let me sit at her table as long as I needed to, which turned out to be most of a week.

I slept in their spare room, the one with the quilt Joe and Lucas’s mother made forty years ago, and mostly I stared at the ceiling and made lists on a legal pad, because making lists gave me something resembling control when everything else had been taken out of my hands.

Sean called that first week, careful with his voice in a way I recognized immediately, because it is the exact voice he used as a boy when he had been sent to deliver news he did not agree with.

“Mom, Dad says fighting any of this is just going to wear you down. He wants you to know that.”

“I’m not fighting anything,” I told him. “I’m just paying attention now.”

There was a long pause on his end. I think some part of my son already knew, even then, that his father had not told him the whole truth about anything, but he was not ready yet to say so out loud, and I was not going to push him. I have found that pushing your children toward the truth before they are ready only teaches them to run from you instead of toward it.

Eula drove up from Wausau a few days later with a casserole and a great deal of gentle talk about moving forward and letting go of bitterness. I thanked her for the casserole. I did not tell her that letting go of bitterness was never really my problem. My problem, if you want to call it that, was that I do not let go of a question until I understand the answer.

By the first week of December I had stopped asking myself why any of this had happened to me. That question has no useful answer, and dwelling in it does nothing but keep you standing in the wreckage. I started asking a more useful question instead. How. How does a careful man, a man who spent thirty one years telling other people to check their coverage every single year without fail, get careless about the one piece of paper that might someday matter to me.