My Sister's Husband Called Me by Her Name · Mira Lang

Chapter 2: The Younger One

Sunday I woke up at six because my body doesn't know about weekends, and I lay there and did the thing where you re-run a sentence.

Robin used to do that too.

In the daylight it was almost sweet. That's what I decided in bed at six fifteen with the heat kicking on. A man buries his wife eight years late, and for one day the wiring in his head crosses, and he says her name to her sister, and then he lies awake feeling like a monster and sends two texts he shouldn't have sent. I've done worse at two in the morning. Everybody has a drawer of messages they'd like back.

I didn't answer either one. I made coffee. My kettle has a hairline crack in the plastic base and it whistles about four seconds before it's actually boiled, so you have to know it, and I stood there waiting out the lie the way I do every morning of my life.

Then I loaded eleven church tablecloths into the back seat and drove to my mother's.

* * *

My mother has lived in the same house on Deerbrook since 1987. There is a wooden goose on the porch. In October the goose wears a sweater.

The house was still in funeral mode: three foil pans on the counter, the good coffee out, the display table from the Legion set up in the front room because nobody could bring themselves to take the pictures down yet. My mother was in the kitchen with Ellen Petrak from next door, and they were doing the part of a funeral that nobody warns you about, which is the second day, when it's just women and Tupperware.

"There she is," my mother said. "Junie, take the ham. I'm not eating that ham for six days."

"I don't want the ham."

"Then Wes wants the ham."

I took the ham.

Ellen Petrak is about seventy and has known us since Miles was in a car seat, and she looked at me over her cup and did the head tilt.

"And how are you holding up, sweetheart."

"I'm okay. It was a nice service."

"It was a beautiful service. That poor man." She meant Aaron. Everybody means Aaron. "And that little girl, my Lord."

My mother said, "Ellen, this is June. Robin's sister. The younger one."

And Ellen said, "Oh — " and something moved across her face, quick, the way a cloud goes over a yard. "Oh, I know. You're the one who—"

And she stopped.

She stopped and she put her cup down and she said, "You're the one who does the medical billing. Deb told me. That's all from home now, isn't it, that's the way everything is."

Nobody in that kitchen made a face. That's what I keep coming back to. My mother said, "It's all from home now, she does it in her pajamas," and Ellen laughed, and I laughed, and somebody said something about the ham again, and the whole thing took maybe two seconds and closed over completely, like water.

I stood there with a foil pan in my hands and my ears hot.

You're the one who.

I have run that sentence a hundred times since. The trouble is that it fits so many endings. You're the one who moved away. You're the one who got divorced. You're the one who found the car. And that's the problem with living in a town of nineteen thousand people: everybody knows one sentence about you and you almost never get told which one.

* * *

Miles came at eleven with Christa and the boys to take the display table apart.

I caught him in the driveway while he was folding the legs on it.

"Can I ask you something without you doing the face."

"I don't have a face."

"Miles."

He set the table against the tailgate. "Go ahead."

"Ellen Petrak just started to say something to me and stopped. In the kitchen. Mom was standing right there."

"Ellen Petrak talks to her mailbox."

"She said, you're the one who — and then she stopped and made it about billing codes."

My brother looked down the driveway for a second. There is a way he stands when he is deciding how much to say, and I have known it since he was fourteen and hiding a dent in Dad's truck, and I saw it and I felt my stomach go cold before I had any actual reason.

"Junie," he said. "Don't start."

"That's not an answer."

"It's Sunday. Mom's in there re-washing dishes she already washed. Everybody's raw." He picked up the table. "You had a rough one yesterday, I know. Just — let this week be a week."

"Miles, what were you not going to answer?"

"Nothing," he said. "There's nothing. That's what I'm telling you."

And then — and this is the part that actually got me, more than any of it — he came back after he'd slid the table into the truck bed, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, kindly:

"Nobody's thinking about it. Okay? Nobody's thought about it in years."

Then he drove home to Willow Bend with his wife and his kids and his folding table, and I stood in my mother's driveway holding a ham.

* * *

I got home at two. Wes works nights at the distribution center out by the interstate, so Sundays he sleeps until three and then he's mine until nine, and that day he came out of the bedroom in a T-shirt with his hair flattened on one side and ate cold ham standing at the counter with the door open.

"How was it."

"Long."

"Your mom good?"

"My mom's laminating."

He laughed. Then he said, "You've been in your head since yesterday," which is the thing about Wes; he's not a subtle man but he's not a stupid one either.

I told him about the kitchen. Not the driveway. Just the kitchen, at the Legion, the wrist and the name.

He chewed for a while.

"That's rough," he said. "That's — yeah. That'd shake me up."

"But."

"I didn't say but."

"You've got a but in your mouth, I can see it."

He put the fork down. "But the man buried his wife. My uncle called me by my dad's name for like a year after my dad died and he wasn't confused, he was just — the wires. It's the wires, Junie." He shrugged. "If he does it again, that's different. If he does it again you tell me and I'll be weird about it with you."

That is, honestly, a completely reasonable position. I have taken it myself about other people's problems.

I said okay. I said it was probably nothing. I ran the dishwasher and answered four work emails to get ahead of Monday, and at nine I drove him to the distribution center because his truck was in the shop, and I came home to an empty house.

And then at eleven o'clock at night, instead of going to bed, I went into the second bedroom and pulled the closet apart looking for a shoebox.

* * *

I keep a box. Everyone does. Mine is an Asics box with a rubber band around it, and inside it there's my grandmother's rosary and my divorce paperwork and a hospital bracelet from July eight years ago that I have never once been able to throw out, and my old phone.

An iPhone 5, white, with a crack in the corner. I had put it in that box in the spring after Robin disappeared, when I upgraded, because I couldn't stand to have the messages migrate onto something I'd carry around every day.

It took me twenty minutes to find a cable that fit. I finally dug one out of the kitchen junk drawer, under the label maker, and I sat on the floor of the second bedroom with my back against the closet door and waited for the apple to come up on the screen.

It took a while. Then it did.

Forty-one messages in the thread with Robin. I have thought about that thread for eight years the way you think about a room in a house you don't live in anymore.

Here is what I have always believed happened on the ninth of September.

Robin texted me that evening, upset, and asked me to drive out to Cobb. And then, before I could go, she texted me again and told me not to come. And I didn't go. I stayed home with my husband, and I was angry with her, and I went to bed, and in the morning her car was at the north ramp.

Don't come. That's the last thing my sister ever said to me. I have carried those two words around like a stone in a coat pocket for eight years.

I scrolled down.

Robin, 5:40 p.m.: are you home

Robin, 5:44 p.m.: can you come out to cobb. north ramp. i'll explain when you get here

Robin, 5:44 p.m.: dont tell aaron

Then mine.

Me, 5:58 p.m.: On my way. 20 min. Don't call mom, I'll handle her.

Then hers.

Robin, 6:12 p.m.: dont come

I sat on that floor with the phone in both hands and read those five messages in order, and then in order again, and the furnace came on somewhere under the house.

Don't come was not before.

Don't come was after.