The Road I Plowed for My Brother in Law

I watched it land on her, the whole thing, the six years and the fifteen weeks and the hallway in Bismarck.

She didn’t cry. She went white and very still, the way she does when something is too big for crying.

“He’s my brother,” she said finally. “He’s my brother and he lost a baby and he didn’t tell me.” She looked down at Hank.

“And I’ve been calling him every week since we came home, asking when he’s coming to see the baby.” She closed her eyes. “Oh, Darrell.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said.

“I should have known,” she said. “Something was wrong all fall. I knew something was wrong. I just thought it was cattle prices.”

But I’ll say this, because it’s true, and Kirsten said it too that night. It doesn’t make what he did all right.

A man can be carrying the heaviest thing in the world and still owe his sister better than a deadbolt at one in the morning.

Lonnie was right that the worst night was already going on. That didn’t make it our fault, and it didn’t make the door any easier to forget.

Kirsten called Lori that night. They talked for an hour and a half, both of them crying most of the time. When she hung up she said, “I told her I’m not mad at her.”

She paused. “I told her I’m not ready to talk to him. That he needs to come himself. When he’s ready. Not her, him.”

That was the consequence, if you want to call it that. Kirsten didn’t make a scene. She didn’t post anything. She didn’t tell her mother.

She just went quiet on her brother. And in a family like hers, where everybody talks to everybody every day, her going quiet was louder than anything she could have said.

We stayed on at the station through Sunday. The furnace man made it out on Monday. It was the inducer motor, like I thought. He had one on his truck.

The whole thing took him forty minutes and cost $340, and the landlord paid it over the phone from Arizona and apologized about six times. We went home that night, and the house was warm by bedtime.

On Tuesday I brought Arlene a box of chocolates from the drugstore, and she made me sit down in her kitchen and eat three of them.

“How’s that boy?” she asked. “How’s my blanket?” I told her Hank slept with it every night now, and wouldn’t settle without it, which was true.

She pressed her lips together and nodded and got up to get the coffee pot so I wouldn’t see her face.

At the co-op on Thursday, one of the old men by the coffee pot said to me, real casual, “Heard you got Darrell Moe’s road open first thing Saturday.” I said I did.

He nodded a long time. “Heard he didn’t come out to thank you.” I said he didn’t have to. The old man looked at me over his cup and didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to either.

I don’t know what Darrell heard that week, or from who. I know he didn’t come to the co-op.

I know he didn’t go to church on Sunday, and he’d ushered at that church every Sunday for ten years.

I know Lori said he hardly ate. I wasn’t glad about any of it. I want to be clear about that. But I wasn’t going to go fix it for him either.