The Fence Line Between Two Brothers

Eleven years

Our mother died in March, eleven years ago. Her name was Lorraine, and she had pancreatic cancer, and from the day they told us to the day she died was nineteen weeks.

I want to tell this part plain, because I told it to myself crooked for a long time.

Curtis and I grew up in one bedroom on this farm, two beds under a slanted ceiling, with a window that looked out at the machine shed. He was three years younger and a lot smarter in school, and he left. There was never any fighting about that. He got a scholarship to K-State, went into civil engineering, took a job with the state, and by thirty he was inspecting bridges all over the eastern half of Kansas and had a wife and a mortgage in Topeka. I stayed. Somebody had to, and I was never any good at anything but this ground. I married Marilyn, and we farmed the north eighty with Dad on shares, and then the rest of it when his back went.

It was no tragedy. I loved it. But a man who stays gets a certain way about the man who left, and a man who leaves gets a certain way about the man who stayed, and it sits at the table every Thanksgiving like an extra place setting.

When Mom got sick, I was twenty minutes away and Curtis was seventy-five miles. I drove her to Kansas City for the scans. I slept in a recliner at the hospital in Hiawatha when they moved her to a swing bed. Curtis came up on weekends. He came every weekend, I will give him that, and he sat with her and read her the county paper out loud, and she loved it. But I was there on the Wednesdays when she couldn’t keep water down, and he wasn’t, and I let that count for more than it should have.

Here is what happened at the end.

On a Sunday afternoon the doctor took Dad and me out into the hallway and told us it would be days. Not weeks. Days. Dad nodded the way he nodded at a weather report. I said I would step out and make a call.

I walked to the end of the hall, by the window that looks out on the parking lot, and I took out my phone and found Curtis’s name. I stood there with my thumb over the green button.

And something hot and mean came up in me. I thought of every Sunday for nineteen weeks that Mom had asked, “Is Curtis coming?” and I had said, “Friday, Mom,” and watched her face go soft with relief, like he was the only one who could do her any good. I thought, let him wait. Let him find out what it costs not to be here.

I put the phone in my pocket.

I told myself Dad would call. Dad told himself, I found out later, that I already had.

Nobody called Curtis. Mom died at ten after four on Tuesday morning, with Dad holding her left hand and me holding her right, and Curtis got the call at five from Dad, who sat in the hospital chapel for forty minutes first because he couldn’t make his fingers work. My brother drove up in the dark and arrived at seven-thirty, and she was already gone and cleaned up and covered to her chin.

I did not say any of this to anyone. Not Marilyn. Not Pastor Dahl. I let everybody believe it was bad luck on the timing.

At the funeral lunch in the basement of Zion Lutheran, with two hundred people eating ham sandwiches and scalloped potatoes and Jell-O salad off paper plates, Curtis walked up and stood in front of me and said, very quietly, “Dad says the doctor told you Sunday.”

“He did,” I said.

“You didn’t call me.”