The Brother My Husband Hid Up North

This past spring Marion had a stroke. A small one, the doctors said, but at seventy-nine there is no such thing as a small one. She was in the hospital in Alexandria for nine days, and I drove over every one of them, because Wes could not always get away from the dairy and someone had to be there and I wanted to be there. On the seventh day she was clearer, her words coming back, her right hand working again. I was sitting by her bed shelling the peas I had brought because the hospital food was killing her, and she was watching me with those pale Haugen eyes, and out of nowhere she said, Colleen, I have to tell you something before I cannot anymore. I almost lost the words this week. I will not risk it again.

I thought she meant she loved me, or some secret about Hollis, some old money thing, the kind of thing old farm families keep. I set the peas down.

She said, do you know where Wes goes every summer.

I will tell you my heart stopped. Eleven years of not asking, and here was his own mother asking me, from a hospital bed, with the IV in her arm.

I said, no. I said, I have thought a lot of things. I said, I thought maybe there was someone.

And Marion closed her eyes, and two tears went down into the lines of her face, and she said, oh, honey. Oh, no. There is someone. But not the way you think. Lord forgive us all, not the way you think.

And then she told me about Danny.

Wes had a brother. A little brother, three years younger, named Daniel but called Danny by everyone, a boy Marion said was born laughing and never really stopped, the opposite of his father in every cell, sunshine where Hollis was flint. I had never heard his name. In eleven years of marriage and more of courting, I had sat at that farm table a thousand times and I had never once heard the name Danny Haugen. There were no pictures of him in the house. I had assumed Wes was an only child. Marion let me assume it. Everyone let me assume it. That was the rule.

When Danny was seventeen and Wes was twenty, the two of them were coming home from a baseball game in Wes’s first truck, late, a July night, and a deer came up out of the ditch on the county road the way they do. Wes swerved. The truck rolled. Wes walked away with a broken wrist. Danny went through the back window and landed wrong, and the boy who came out of the coma four weeks later in a hospital in the Cities was not the boy who went in. He could not walk right. He could not talk the way he had. He needed help with everything, and he would need it for the rest of his life.

Wes was driving.