The Brother My Husband Hid Up North

We have two. Marcus is fifteen now, all elbows and appetite, and Nora just turned eleven, which is a hard age for a girl to watch her father drive away and not take her. When the kids were little they cried at the window. Later they stopped crying and just got hard about it, the way kids do when they decide a thing about their parent and file it away to use later. Marcus went through a stretch at thirteen where he would not say goodbye to his dad at all, just watched from the porch with his arms crossed like a little old man. I did not blame him. I was doing the same thing on the inside.

Because here is what I thought. I thought there was another woman.

I want to be honest about that, because I am not proud of where my mind went, but I think any wife would have gone there. A man who leaves every single summer, same time, same amount of days, with a bag he packs himself and a destination he will not name. A man who comes home thinner and quiet and somehow older, who sleeps a full day and then slowly comes back to himself over a week. A man who will not let you see his phone in July, not because he is hiding texts, but because he just sets it face down and leaves the room. You do the math a wife does. I did it a hundred times. I did it at the kitchen sink and in the church pew and lying awake next to him in the dark listening to him breathe and thinking, who are you, and where do you go, and why is it not me.

I never caught him in anything. That was almost worse. There was no lipstick, no receipt, no name. There was just the leaving, year after year, and the wall he put up every July that I could not climb and could not knock down.

I almost left him twice.

The first time was the sixth summer. Nora was a baby and Marcus was ten and I had a fever of a hundred and two, and Wes still went. He stood in our bedroom with his duffel bag and he looked at me shaking under the quilt and he said, Colleen, I have to go, I am sorry, I have to. And I said, if you walk out that door with me like this you are telling me something, and he said, I know, and he went anyway. I called my sister Diane in Fergus Falls crying so hard I could not get the words out. She drove two hours in the dark to sit with me. She wanted me to pack the kids and come back with her. I did not. I do not fully know why. Something in me still trusted the man under the wall, even when I hated the wall.