The June I Took My Sister Instead

“I want to get it all out before you say anything,” he said, “because if you say something first, I’ll lose my nerve.”

“I never thought about how it would look to you,” he said. He said it to the tablecloth first, and then he made himself look at me.

“Not once. The kids asked, and Emma cried, and I thought finally I can do something right for them, and I wrote the check. I never once thought about you sitting on that porch.”

“That’s worse, isn’t it?” he said. “Worse than if I did it on purpose.” I did not answer that, because he knew the answer.

“And then you said the thing about the trips,” he said.

“About everything being too pricey. I went home that night and couldn’t sleep, because you were right. I’ve said that to you about every single place you ever wanted to go.”

He turned the coffee cup in its saucer.

“My dad lost the farm in ’85. I was seven. I remember the auction. I remember them selling Mom’s piano off a hay wagon. Ever since, any dollar that isn’t for the house or the truck or the kids or that one week with my family, it feels like I’m throwing it in the ditch.”

I had known his dad lost the farm. I had not known about the piano. “I’m not saying it so you’ll go easy,” he said.

“I’m saying I finally figured out why I do it. And I figured out I was making you pay for it. For six years. You, of all people.”

“Mom asked where you were every day,” he said.

“Every day I made up something new, and every time it sounded worse. By Thursday Tina wasn’t speaking to me. By Friday Jake asked me if you broke up with me, and I told him I hoped not. I told him I had some driving to do.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The waitress filled our cups and went away. Out the window the steam was still lifting off the hills. Then Kevin picked up his phone.

“I’m not here to ask you to come home,” he said.

“You’ve got one more day here and it’s yours. I’ll drive back to Iowa today. I just had to ask you one thing to your face. Where do you want to go next year? You and me. Wherever you want. And don’t tell me Gatlinburg.”

I looked at him a long time. Six years of brochures went through my head at once, like a deck of cards being shuffled.

Branson. Galena. The candy store. This hotel. And the one I had always wanted most, the one I had stopped bringing up.

“The Black Hills,” I said. “Custer State Park. I want to see the bison walk up to the car.” He did not say it was pricey. He did not say it was too far.

He opened his phone right there at the breakfast table, with his reading glasses on the end of his nose that he hates for anybody to see, and pulled up the lodge in the state park.

He found the cabins. He found the second week of June next year, the week after his family’s week, so he would never have to choose.

He asked how many nights, and I said five. He typed it in.

Then he stopped with his thumb over the screen and looked at me, and then he looked at Robin. “Two cabins,” he said. “If Robin wants to come.”