The June I Took My Sister Instead

The whole town was steaming. The wooded hills had little clouds lifting off them like smoke off a stove lid, and the old brick buildings down below were dark and shining from the rain.

The air smelled like wet stone and wet leaves.

I sat down in the rocking chair next to her in my coral T-shirt and white capris, and she told me about Pat.

She had gone back Friday morning on her own for a second bath. It was the first thing she had done alone since the divorce.

Pat, it turned out, had been married thirty-one years to a man who would not take her anywhere either. “She left him at fifty-four,” Robin said.

“She went to the Grand Canyon by herself on a bus, and she stood at the edge and hollered his name off it, just to hear it go.”

“It came back three times,” Robin said, “and she told me she didn’t answer it any of them.” I laughed so hard I had to hold my stomach.

Robin was laughing too, holding her cup out so she would not spill, and I was as happy as I have ever been in my life.

Then Robin stopped rocking. She was looking past me, down at the street. Her face changed, not frightened, just surprised. “Dawn,” she said. “Look who it is.”

I turned in my chair. Kevin’s gray Silverado was sitting in the hotel lot with Tennessee mud up the sides.

And Kevin was standing beside it in yesterday’s clothes, with his hand over his eyes against the bright gray sky, looking up at the balconies one by one.

He found us. He lifted his hand, not a wave, just lifted it, the way a man does at the end of a long row.

I sat in that rocking chair with my heart going and looked down at him, and he stood in that lot and looked up at me, and neither one of us moved.

He had driven eleven hours. He had left the ridge above Gatlinburg at nine the night before, after the last big supper at Joan’s cabin, and gone straight through on I-40, Nashville and Memphis and across the river to Little Rock, with two stops for gas and a construction backup outside Memphis at one in the morning.

Tina was driving the kids home to Iowa. Joan had packed him a sack of ham sandwiches.

Tina had walked him out to his truck, he told me later, and said, “Kevin, go. I’ll get the kids home. Don’t be the man who doesn’t go.”

I came down. Robin came with me, because I asked her to, and because she would not have missed it for the world.

He met us in the lobby. He had not shaved. His eyes were red around the edges, and he had his cap in both hands, turning it.

“Morning, Kevin,” Robin said. He asked if he could buy us ladies breakfast.

The hotel served breakfast in a big old room off the lobby with tall windows and white tablecloths. We took a table by the window.

Robin sat beside me and ordered eggs and biscuits and gravy, and then she got very busy with her eggs and did not look up.

Kevin did not touch his coffee. He set his phone on the tablecloth, face up, and put his hands flat beside it like he was about to be sworn in.