The Five Years My Brother Kept Us

A Hy-Vee Parking Lot in Omaha

I married Travis Meeks when I was twenty-seven, a man with a good laugh and a bad habit of believing the next job would be the one. We lived in Omaha. Piper was born in March the year after, and I worked the front desk at a dental office on Dodge Street while Travis worked wherever the money was.

Five summers ago in July, he took a pipeline job in North Dakota. He called it a six-month contract and said it would fix us. He sent four checks, each one smaller than the last, and then he stopped answering his phone. The state child support office has his address and nothing else.

I did not tell anybody. That is my way. In a family where the older brother carries everything, the younger sister learns to carry the one thing she is allowed to carry, which is her own face. I kept it on. I kept paying the rent, $1,150 a month, out of a paycheck that was not built for it, until the lease came up in August and the landlord asked for a number I did not have.

So I sat in the Hy-Vee lot on Center Street with a bag of groceries melting in the back seat and Piper in her car seat asking why we were not going home, and I called my brother.

He picked up on the second ring. I had not even said anything yet.

“Janelle,” he said. “Where are you?”

I told him all of it, the whole ugly list. It took four minutes and I cried for three of them, and he did not say a word until I was finished.

Then he said, “I’ll be there Sunday with a trailer.”

“Six months,” I said. “Curt, just until I get my feet under me. Six months.”

“Take your time,” he said.

He drove down in a borrowed trailer and loaded my couch and Piper’s crib mattress and our boxes, with Piper on his hip the entire time, because she had decided that day that he was hers. He did not once tell me what I should have done differently. He did not say Travis’s name.

On the drive back, Piper fell asleep in the middle seat of his pickup with her head against his arm. He drove one-handed for ninety miles so he would not wake her.

A man who loves you that plainly makes it very easy to forget that you are being loved at his expense.