The June I Took My Sister Instead

I lay awake a long time after she fell asleep, thinking about all the things a person can forget they like when they are busy making themselves small for somebody.

Then I thought about my own six years and the brochures, and I lay there with that too.

On Sunday we went to the early service at a little brick church a few blocks down.

My phone buzzed during the last hymn, and I checked it in the parking lot. It was a text from Kevin. “Mom keeps asking where you are.”

I thought about it a long time before I answered. “Tell her I’m in Hot Springs with Robin. Tell her I love her.” He did not write back, and he did not call.

Monday it poured. We bought two cheap umbrellas at a drugstore and walked the Grand Promenade behind the bathhouses anyway, the brick path all slick and steaming.

We filled two jugs at one of the spring fountains where the local people line up with their milk jugs, and the water came out warm.

“It comes out of the ground hot,” Robin kept saying. “Nobody heats it.” I told her that was the whole point of the town. “I know,” she said. “But it’s different to put your hand under it.”

Monday night my phone buzzed again. It was Emma, with a picture of the porch of Kevin’s cabin. Two rocking chairs. One had Kevin’s ballcap on it. The other one, the one I always sat in, was empty.

“Grandma keeps asking,” Emma wrote. “Dad keeps saying it’s complicated. Is it complicated?”

I sat on the edge of the hotel bed and looked at that picture a long time.

Robin was in the bathroom running the tub, humming. What do you tell a fifteen-year-old girl about her father, when you love the both of them?

“It’s a grown-up thing,” I wrote back. “Nobody’s mad at you or Jake. I love you both so much. Enjoy having your mom and dad on the same porch. That’s a big deal, and you should enjoy it.”

She wrote back a heart and then, a minute later, “I miss you.” I told her I missed her too, sweet girl, and I would see her in July.

Then I set the phone face down and did not pick it up again until morning.

Tuesday Joan called me herself. I was on the balcony with my feet up on the rail, watching the rain come across the hills in sheets.

Robin was asleep again. She had been sleeping ten hours a night, like a tired child, and waking up looking five years younger.

“Dawn, honey,” Joan said. “I have heard that boy explain where you are eleven different ways since Saturday.”

“He told Aunt Marcie you had a family thing,” she went on.

“He told his sister it was Robin’s idea. He told the cousins you get carsick in the mountains, which you do not, because you rode in the back of my van on those switchbacks for five years and never once got sick.”

“And every time he tells one,” Joan said, “he sits out on that porch afterward by himself like a dog that’s been in the garbage.” I laughed. I could not help it. Joan laughed too, a little.

“I’m not calling to make you come back,” she said.

“I’m calling to tell you I’m glad you took your sister. That girl needed a trip worse than anybody I know. And I raised him better than this. He knows it. The Mraz men are slow, but they do get there.”