The June I Took My Sister Instead

“It was,” I said. “Mm,” said Joan. That was all. But Joan Mraz has been reading her son for forty-eight years, and I could hear her reading him in that one sound.

Robin and I left the same Saturday the Mraz family left for Tennessee. Emma texted me a picture of her dad’s cooler and the life jackets in the truck bed with the words “wish u were coming.”

I wrote back, “Me too, honey. Have the best time. Catch your dad a fish.”

We left at five in the morning in my car with a thermos of coffee and a sack of my egg sandwiches.

Robin had packed like she was going overseas, two suitcases and a tote bag and a pillow from home, because she said hotel pillows were for show.

It is about nine hours from Centerville to Hot Springs, straight down through Missouri.

We crossed the state line at Lancaster before the sun was all the way up, and Robin fell asleep with her head on the window before Kirksville.

She slept most of Missouri, and I let her.

I drove with the radio low and thought about Kevin somewhere on the interstate headed for the Smokies, with Emma and Jake fighting over the back seat and Tina following in her own car.

Robin woke up somewhere past Springfield, looked out at the hills, and said, “Oh.” Just that. Like she had forgotten there was any land in the world that was not flat and planted in corn.

We picked up Highway 7 at Harrison. If you have never driven it, it winds down through the middle of the Arkansas hills, up and over and around, with the trees so close in places they touch overhead.

Robin rolled her window all the way down and put her hand out.

“Doug would have hated this road,” she said. I told her Doug was not here. “No,” she said, and she smiled at the trees. “Doug is not here.”

The hotel was older than anything in Appanoose County. It sat up the hill off Central Avenue with the old bathhouses lined up below, all brick and tile and arched windows.

Our room on the third floor had two beds, a ceiling fan, and a door out to the stone balcony with the rocking chairs I had circled years before.

Robin walked straight out onto that balcony with her jacket still on and stood at the rail.

The wooded hills went up on every side of town, dark green and close, and the old brick buildings stepped down the street below. Somewhere a church bell was ringing.

“I’ve never been in a hotel with a balcony,” she said again, like she had to keep saying it to believe it.

It started raining that first night, and it rained four days. I had looked at the forecast every day for a week and prayed over it.

But the rain turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, because Robin loved it.

She opened the window by her bed the first night, all the way up, and the rain came in on the sill. I said she would get cold. She said she did not care one bit.

“I haven’t slept with the window open in twenty-six years,” she said into the dark. “Doug ran the air conditioning from April to October. He said the noise kept him up. Rain, crickets, anything.”

I listened to the rain on the balcony stones. Then she said, “I forgot I liked rain, Dawn. Isn’t that the strangest thing? I forgot something I liked.”