The Five Years My Brother Kept Us

The Pump ‘n Pantry

I did not sleep. Saturday I drove to Kearney with Dalton, because I had said I would, and I could not tell you one thing he said at lunch.

Sunday after church, I found my brother on his front porch with a cup of coffee.

I had a speech. It was four pages long in my head. I got as far as “I want to explain” when he said:

“I heard you Friday.”

I opened my mouth. He held up one hand, and I closed it.

“There’s a ground-floor two-bedroom on Locust Street. Gene Hovorka owns it and he’s holding it till noon tomorrow. It’s $725. I’ll pay the first month. After that, the rent is yours.”

“Curt, you don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t.” He looked up at the porch light. “I’m not throwing you out, Janelle. I’m done being something you have to explain.”

I cried. I could not help it. He stood there with his coffee until I was finished, and he did not put his arm around me, and I understood that was a decision, not an absence.

The next Saturday was moving day, the first one in October. I got up at seven and drove to the Pump ‘n Pantry for packing tape and coffee. At the register, a woman in her sixties with silver hair and a church-fundraiser sweatshirt said, “Janelle?” and I knew her before she said her name.

Dolores Pike. Her daughter, Marcy, taught third grade in Wellfield for a few years. Five winters ago Marcy was at Curt’s house all the time, a friend and then something more, always with a casserole dish and a nice laugh. Then she stopped coming. I never asked why. I was busy being looked after.

“I heard you’re moving out of Curt’s,” Dolores said. “That’s good, honey. It’s about time somebody gave that man his life back.”

I said, “I don’t understand.”

She looked at me a long moment, and I watched her realize I didn’t.

“He never told you,” she said. “Oh, honey. Of course he didn’t.”

They had been engaged. I never knew. He had bought her a ring that spring, $2,100 at Hanson’s in Kearney, and he meant to ask her at Thanksgiving. Instead, in November of my first winter in his house, Marcy sat him down at her mother’s kitchen table and said she loved him, but she could not start a marriage in a house with a woman and a five-year-old who had nowhere else to go. She asked him to find us a place. She said, “Them or me.”

“What did Curt say?” I asked.

Dolores wiped her eyes with a knuckle. “He said, ‘Piper doesn’t have anybody else.’ And she left.”