The Kitchen My Husband’s Brother Left Gutted

Troy stood in my back doorway with a coffee cup in his hand and looked at my kitchen like a man looking at somebody else’s problem.

It was a Tuesday evening in late October, and I was stirring chili.

The chili was on a two-burner hot plate, and the hot plate sat on a white folding table where my counters used to be.

Behind me, my three kids ate chili out of our everyday bowls at a card table.

There were no counters. There were no cabinets, no sink, no stove, and no floor but the old plank boards that had been under the ruined linoleum. There were no walls at all, only the bare wood studs some Kessler carpenter had nailed up in 1924.

A work light on a yellow stand lit the whole room, because the ceiling fixture had come down with everything else.

Wires hung loose between the studs where the old outlets had been, and clear plastic was taped over one doorway to keep the dust out of the rest of the house.

My dishes were drying on a towel spread across a stack of drywall. That drywall had been delivered in May.

“Coming along,” Troy said.

He was wearing his tan canvas work jacket and the same kind of ball cap he has worn since high school, and his beard had gone salt-and-pepper sometime in the last couple of years without my noticing. He is forty-seven. He looked older that night.

My name is Jenna Kessler. I am forty-one years old, and I am a vet tech at the county animal clinic.

I spend my days holding dogs still for shots and cats still for stitches, and I am good at keeping my voice level while something is fighting me.

I kept my voice level then. “When are you coming back, Troy?” I asked him, with the spoon still going around in the chili.

He took a slow sip of his coffee. He looked at the studs, and the plastic, and the hot plate, and my kids.

He did not look at me, not once, the whole time he stood there.

“You’ll get it when you get it, Jenna,” he said. Then he turned around and went out the back door, and a minute later I heard his truck start up and go down the lane.

Avery, my oldest, is twelve. She had not looked up from her plate the whole time her uncle stood there.

Lily is five. She was already in her pink pajamas, because I had given her a bath early, in the same tub where I wash our dishes.

She looked up at me with chili on her chin. “Is Uncle Troy mad at us?”

“No, baby,” I said. “Uncle Troy is just busy.” I believed about half of that.

I want to be honest about the half I did not believe, because this story is not only about my brother-in-law. Some of it is about me.

The Ohio River came up in April the way it does some springs, and this time it came up farther than anybody on our road had seen since 1997.

Our farmhouse sits on the bottoms in western Kentucky, on ground the Kesslers have farmed for four generations.

Matt’s grandfather set the house up on a high block foundation for exactly this reason. It did not matter.

The water came across the field in the night and stood two feet deep in the kitchen for three days before it went back where it belonged.