The Kitchen My Husband’s Brother Left Gutted

“I know it has,” Dusty said. “And I’m sorry about that. I am. But this house sat five months, Troy. With these kids in it.”

Troy turned and looked at me then. For the first time since April, I think he actually looked at me. “You did this,” he said. It was not a question.

“I did,” I said. “I’m paying them out of our soybean check. Thirty and twenty-four an hour. They’ll be here until it’s done, and then they’re yours again.”

I had expected him to be angry. I had braced myself for it all week. But what came across his face was not anger.

It was something more like a man who has been holding up a wall by himself for months and has just felt it start to move.

“Matt know?” he said.

“Matt knows everything,” I said. “Dusty told him the first day. About the lumber yard. About the loan. About Kristy.”

Troy closed his eyes. He stood like that a long time in the doorway of my kitchen, with his cap in his hand.

“I was going to pay it back,” Troy said, still with his eyes shut.

“Every dollar of it. I just needed that loan to come loose. I thought it would be a month. Then it was two.”

“I believe you,” I said. And I did. “But I needed a kitchen, Troy. Your nieces and your nephew needed a kitchen.”

He opened his eyes and nodded once, and went back out, and I heard him drive away.

Then I sat down on an upside down five gallon bucket in the middle of my kitchen and shook for a little while.

Matt called his mother that night. I did not ask him to.

I heard him on the phone in the mud room, talking low, and I heard him say, “Mom, I think there are some things you need to know about Troy.”

Marlys Kessler is seventy-two years old. She raised both of those boys on this farm and buried her husband out of this house, and she still drives herself to church every Sunday in a Buick with ninety thousand miles on it.

She came out on Saturday. She did not call first. She never does. She walked in the back door in her good church coat and stood in the middle of my kitchen and looked at it.

She looked at all of it for a long time. Then she looked at me. “Five months, Jenna?”

“Since May,” I said.

“And you didn’t call me.”

“He’s your son, Marlys,” I said. “I didn’t want to make you choose between your boys.”

She pressed her lips together. “That’s what mothers are for, honey. Choosing is the whole job.” Then she turned to Matt.

“Call your brother. Tell him his mother is at your house and would like to see him. Today, please.”

Troy came within the hour. He came in the back door slowly, the way a boy comes into a room when he knows his mother is in it and waiting for him.

Marlys was standing by the folding table. She had found one of my aprons in the mud room and put it on over her church dress, and she was stirring the pot of beans I had going on the hot plate as if it were her own stove.

“Troy,” she said, without turning around. “Kristy left in February.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you told me she was in Evansville.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She set down the spoon and turned and looked at him.

“I am not going to say one word about Kristy,” she said.