The Brother My Husband Hid Up North
For eleven summers my husband took a trip without us and I was certain I knew the reason
The first summer I told myself it was work. The second summer I told myself it was grief, because his father had died that spring and men do strange things with grief. By the eleventh summer I had stopped telling myself anything at all. I just watched him load the truck in the gray light before the kids woke, and I let the hurt sit in me like a stone I had swallowed and could not cough back up.
My name is Colleen. I am forty-two years old, and I have spent most of my life inside the same twelve square miles of Otter County, Minnesota, where the county road runs straight as a ruler past the Haugen dairy and the Lutheran church and the feed store that still has my grandfather’s name in the ledger if you go back far enough. I married Wes Haugen when I was twenty-four. We stood up in front of Pastor Lund at Immanuel with the windows open and the smell of cut hay coming in, and I meant every word I said that day. I think he did too. That is the part that took me eleven years to understand. He meant it. He just could not tell me the truth, because the truth had a name, and in his family that name was not allowed to be spoken out loud.
Let me tell you how it went, because the way it went is the whole thing.
Every July, right around the second week, Wes would get quiet. Not mean, never mean. Quiet. He would start checking the oil in the truck and going through the cooler and standing in the garage at night under the one bulb, doing nothing I could see. And then one morning he would be gone, with a duffel bag and a thermos and some excuse I had learned to see coming the way you learn to see weather coming off the lake.
The excuses changed. A buddy’s cabin up on the Gunflint. A fishing thing with men from the co-op. A job for his cousin down in Iowa that paid cash and could not wait. One year it was a veterans’ fishing weekend, which was a strange one, because Wes never served and I knew it, but I did not say anything, because by then I had learned that asking only made his jaw go tight and his eyes go somewhere I could not follow.
He was gone two weeks. Sometimes a little more. He never took us. Not once in eleven years. Not the kids, not me.