The Fiance Who Wanted My Brothers Gone

My fiance wanted my twin brothers gone before the wedding and the whole church watched me choose

I want to tell you about the ring first, because that is the part people still bring up when they see me at the Piggly Wiggly or at the pump outside the Marathon station. A little gold band with a chip of a diamond you had to tilt toward the light to find. It cost Garrett two paychecks, he told me more than once, like the price was a thing I was supposed to carry around in my chest and be grateful for.

I set that ring down on a paper tablecloth in the basement of Caney Ridge Baptist on a Sunday evening in October, in front of about sixty people who had come to eat sheet cake and wish us well. I laid it next to a plate of cake nobody got to finish. And I want you to know that by the time my fingers let go of it, I was not shaking anymore. I had been shaking for about a year. I just did not know it until the shaking stopped.

But I am getting ahead of myself. You cannot understand the ring on the tablecloth until you understand the boys, and you cannot understand the boys until I tell you about the worst night of my life, which was a Tuesday in February two winters ago, out on the Calfkiller road.

My name is June. I was twenty-four that February, and I had a little apartment over the hardware store in Caney Ridge, Tennessee, which is a town you have never heard of up on the Cumberland Plateau, the kind of place where the water tower has the high school mascot painted on it and the whole town drives forty minutes to Cookeville for anything you cannot get at the Dollar General. I cut hair. I still do. I rent a chair at Donna’s shop on the square, and I have cut the hair of about every woman in that county at one time or another, which matters to this story, so hold on to it.

My mama and daddy were Renae and Hollis Tackett. They had me young, and then they thought they were done, and then twelve years later God sent them twins. Caleb and Jesse. My brothers were seven that February, and I loved them the way you love something you got to help raise, which is a different thing than the way you love a brother closer to your own age. I changed their diapers. I taught them to tie their shoes sitting on the back steps. When Mama worked nights at the nursing home I was the one who heated up the fish sticks.

That Tuesday my folks drove over to Sparta to pick up a used dryer somebody was selling cheap, because ours had quit, and it had come an ice storm that afternoon that nobody took serious enough. The Calfkiller road has a bad curve down by the low-water bridge. A log truck coming the other way could not hold it on the ice. My daddy died at the scene. My mama died the next morning at the Cookeville hospital, holding my hand, and the last thing she said to me, when she could still talk, was “the boys.” Not a sentence. Just that. The boys.