The Brother My Husband Hid Up North

The second time was the ninth summer, and that time it was quieter and colder, which is how you know a marriage is in real trouble. I did not cry. I just started a list in the back of a church directory, a list of what I would need to do, who I would call, how the custody might go. I kept that list for two years. I added to it every July. By the eleventh summer it was three pages.

Now I have to tell you about Marion, because Marion is the one who finally told me the truth, and if she had died first, which the doctors thought she might, I would have gone to my grave believing a lie about the best man I ever knew.

Marion is Wes’s mother. She is seventy-nine. She lives alone out on the old Haugen place, a white farmhouse with green shutters and a windbreak of spruce her husband Hollis planted the year they married. Hollis Haugen died eleven years ago, that first spring, and the man was a piece of flint his whole life, hard the way some of the old farmers out here are hard, the kind of hard that comes from burying your own softness young and never digging it back up. I will say more about Hollis, because Hollis is the villain of this story, even though he was dead for all of it. A dead man can still run a family if everyone agrees to keep obeying him. That was the Haugens. They obeyed Hollis for eleven years after they buried him.

Marion and I were always close, closer than I was to my own mother in some ways. She taught me to make lefse the right way, with a sock on the rolling pin. She sat with me through both labors. She never once let me feel like the girl from the Novak place who married up, even though Hollis made sure I felt it plenty. When Hollis was alive, Sunday dinners at the farm were a trial. He would find the one thing wrong with the meal, the one weak spot in a man, the one soft place in a child, and press on it with his thumb until it bruised. Marion would go still at those dinners. She had a way of going somewhere behind her own eyes. I understand that now. She had been practicing that stillness for fifty years.