The June I Took My Sister Instead

Afterward we lay on the cots in the cooling room wrapped in clean sheets, side by side, and Robin reached across the gap and held my hand the way she used to when there was thunder at Grandma’s.

“Thank you,” she said. “For bringing me instead.” I told her she was not instead. I had only figured out who I was saving it for.

Thursday Tina called. I almost did not answer. I had her number from years of trading off the kids for Kevin, but she had never once called me just to call.

I stepped out onto the balcony and picked up on the last ring.

“I’m not going to keep you,” she said. She sounded tired.

“I just found out today that Kevin didn’t ask you about the cabin. Before he booked it. He told me in February you said it was great for the kids. I’d never have come if I knew. I’d have stayed home.”

“My dad passed at Christmas,” she said. “The kids knew I was having a bad year. That’s why they begged him. They were trying to be good to me, and he was trying to be good to them. I don’t think he thought about you for one second, and I’m sorry, because you’re the one who’s been good to my kids for six years.”

I stood at the stone rail and looked at the hills, and I felt something unknot in my chest that I had not known was knotted. I told her I was sorry about her dad. I had not known.

“They’re having the best time,” she said, and her voice went soft. “Jake caught a trout at the stocked pond, and he’s told everybody on this mountain. Emma keeps saying it’d be perfect if you were here.”

“Dawn, he’s miserable,” she said. “I’m not saying that so you’ll feel sorry for him. I was married to him nine years, and I have never once seen him this miserable over anything that wasn’t a ballgame.”

That made me laugh, and that made her laugh, and for a minute we were just two women on the phone laughing about the same man, which I had never in my life expected to do with Tina Mraz.

Before she hung up, I told her I hoped she got some rest up there. “You too,” she said. “I mean it.”

Friday it rained one last long time, all afternoon, hard and steady. Robin and I sat under the overhang in the rocking chairs and watched it come down the hills. We did not talk much. We did not need to.

That night Robin opened her window again. The rain was soft by then, just a patter on the stones.

“I’m going to start sleeping in my bed again when we get home,” she said into the dark. “I’m going to open the window and sleep in the bed.”

“I think I’ve been sleeping in that chair because I was waiting for somebody to come tell me I could go to bed,” she said. “Fifty years old. Well, nobody’s coming. So I’m telling myself.”

I fell asleep listening to the rain and to my sister breathing, slow and even, in a real bed with the window open.

Saturday morning the rain was gone. I woke at six to light around the curtains, the first dry gray light all week.

I made the little coffee pot go and took a cup out to Robin, who was already in her rocking chair on the balcony in her light blue blouse, looking out at the town.