The Front Row Seat in the Orchard

Brandi

I should tell you about my sister, because she is not a villain, and I do not want you to think she is.

She is three years older than me. When I was small she braided my hair every morning before school because Mom left early for her shift.

Brandi had asthma bad as a kid, the kind that put her in the hospital at Blodgett twice before she was ten.

Mom learned to give her whatever would keep her from getting upset, because upset meant wheezing and wheezing meant the hospital.

Brandi outgrew the asthma. Mom never outgrew the giving in. By the time we were teenagers it was simply how our house ran.

Brandi wanted, Mom gave, and I was the one who did not need much, which everybody said like it was a compliment.

She married Matt Dykstra at twenty-seven. They tried for a baby for five years.

Nora came at the end of May after two rounds of fertility treatment that cost them a second mortgage on a house in Jenison they could not really afford.

Then in August Matt told her he was not cut out for it. He moved in with a buddy in Hudsonville. He sends some money.

He has seen Nora three times. My sister has been doing every night feeding and every day of daycare drop-off and a full-time job at the credit union, alone.

So I knew why she wanted the aisle seat. She wanted a place to stand up and walk away when Nora melted down.

She wanted, for one day, to be the one somebody made room for. I understood every bit of it.

But Grandma is eighty-four, and the back of her hand was taped shut, and she had told me she could see fine from the second row.

Some things are true at the same time. I lay awake most of that night holding all of them.