The June I Took My Sister Instead

Six years, and Kevin and I had not taken one single trip that was just the two of us, that I had picked, that started with my idea and ended with his arm around me somewhere neither of us had been.

“Okay,” I said that night. That was all I said.

He took it for agreement, and he finished his pork chop, and he watched the end of the Cyclones game in my living room with his boots off, and he went home to his place in town at ten like always.

People have asked me since why I didn’t fight him on it, why I didn’t call him that night and tell him to cancel it, or march over to his house, or tell his mother.

The plain answer is that we were not married. It was his money and his card.

And I was not going to beg a grown man to put me first. If I had to ask for it, I did not want it.

I went to the back bedroom closet and got down the shoebox. Inside was a bank envelope, and inside the envelope was every dollar I had put back since our second Christmas.

Twenty dollars out of every check. My little bonus for perfect attendance. Two summers of mowing the church cemetery.

I had started it for us. I had written “Our Trip” on the front in my best handwriting, like a schoolgirl, and I had never told Kevin, because I wanted it to be a surprise.

I thought one day I would set it on the table and say, now it is not too pricey.

I counted it on the bed, and then I counted it again, because I did not believe it. Thirty-eight hundred and forty dollars.

I sat there with the money in my lap and laughed out loud in my empty house. It was not a happy laugh, exactly.

It was the kind you let out when the Lord is plainly pointing at something and you would have to be blind to miss it.

Then I called my sister. Robin is five years older than me. She was married twenty-six years to a man named Doug who sold seed corn and never once took her farther than the Iowa State Fair.

They divorced last fall. He kept the house in Seymour, and she kept the dog and a little rental on the edge of Centerville.

She answered on the fourth ring, sounding like she had been asleep in her chair.

Since the divorce she fell asleep in her chair most nights with the television going. She said the bed was too big. “What’s wrong? It’s after eleven.”

“Nothing’s wrong. Can you get the second week of June off?” She worked the front desk at the clinic and had more days banked than anybody there, because she never went anywhere.

“I suppose. Why?” When I told her we were going to Hot Springs, there was a long quiet on the line. I could hear her dog breathing. “Dawn, isn’t that Kevin’s family week?”

So I told her. The cabin, the card, the thirty-eight hundred. Then I told her about the shoebox.

When I got to the part about the number being nearly the same, she made a sound I had not heard out of her in a year. It took me a second to know it was a laugh.

“Well, that’s just the Lord being funny,” she said. I told her that was exactly what I had said. Then she said she could not let me spend my money on her.