The Weekend My Brother Kept Daddy

He read for a long time. Daddy sat at the table between us, calm as anything, nudging the two pill boxes with one finger, the colored morning one and then the white night one.

“Shelby,” Kirk finally said. “I can’t just. I have work. Dawn’s got the girls at a tournament in Green Bay.”

“It’s Friday afternoon,” I said. “You’re already out of the office, and it doesn’t open again till Monday. I’ll call at seven every morning and nine every night. If you need me any other time, I’ll answer. I won’t be far.”

He looked at me for a long moment. I think he was waiting for me to say the rest of it. To say: this is about the money.

To say: you went behind my back. I didn’t say any of it. I had decided not to, and I meant it.

“You’re doing this because of Paul,” he said quietly.

“I’m doing this because you’re his son,” I said. “And because I haven’t slept a whole night since last summer. That’s all. You can do two nights. You raised two babies. You’ll be fine.”

I bent down and kissed the top of Daddy’s head, where his thin white hair was soft as a baby’s. “Be good for Kirk,” I said.

“I’m always good,” Daddy said. “Your brother’s the one you have to watch.”

Kirk almost laughed. I saw it start at the corner of his mouth and stop. Then I walked out the back door, down the porch steps, and across the yard to where Mitch was waiting in the shade with the engine running.

I did not look back, because I knew if I looked back I would go back in.

The county fair smelled the way it always had, like fried cheese curds and diesel and cattle and cotton candy all at once.

Steve’s camper was parked behind the dairy barn under a box elder tree, and Amy came running out to hug me in her 4-H shirt.

“Aunt Shelby, you came,” she said, and she pulled me straight into the barn to see Clementine, who was lying in clean straw with a fan blowing on her, chewing her cud like she owned the place.

I scratched the heifer’s poll and breathed in that barn smell, and I thought of Daddy in the parlor at five in the morning, singing to his cows.

At nine that night I called the farm. Kirk answered on the fourth ring. In the background I could hear the television too loud, a Western, which meant Daddy had found the remote.

“He took his pills,” Kirk said. “The eight o’clock one. He fought me on the eye drops. I got one in his eye and one on his cheek.”

“Tip his head back on the recliner first,” I said. “Put your thumb under his eye and pull down a little. Tell him a story while you do it. He likes to hear about the 1965 flood.”

“I don’t know about the 1965 flood.”

“Then ask him,” I said. “He’ll tell you.”

There was a long pause on the line. Then Kirk said, “Okay,” like it cost him something, and hung up.

I slept that night in Steve’s camper with the windows open and the cattle barn fans humming outside, and for the first time in fourteen months I didn’t have the baby monitor beside my pillow.

It felt like missing a tooth. I woke up three times anyway, out of habit, at the exact hours Daddy usually got up.

At seven Saturday morning I called again. Kirk sounded like a man who had been up since before five.