She sat down at my kitchen table on a Tuesday night in March with her purse still hooked over her arm. Like she might need to leave in a hurry.

Dad sat down next to her with his seed cap in his lap. He turned it around and around by the bill. The same way he used to in the pew when the sermon ran long.

“We won’t keep you,” Mom said. “You’ve got the route in the morning.”

“I’ve got coffee on,” I said. “Stay as long as you want.”

My husband, Dale, was at the end of the table in his barn socks. He’d come in from the hog barns twenty minutes earlier, showered, and was still pink around the ears.

He nodded at my folks. He didn’t say anything. Dale doesn’t say anything unless it needs saying.

Mom looked at Dad.

Dad looked at his cap.

“It’s about Jeff,” Mom said.

I’d figured that. Everything that winter had been about Jeff.

My little brother is forty-three years old. His wife, Amber, packed up her car the second week of January and moved to Sioux Falls. She told him she’d been unhappy for six years.

She left him the kids. The bills. And the lease on a rental house in town that the landlord was selling out from under them.

Since February, Jeff and his three kids had been living in my parents’ basement.

Brody is twelve. Kenzie is nine. Cole is six.

They were sleeping on air mattresses. Right next to Dad’s deer mounts and the chest freezer.

“It’s your folks,” he said. “And it’s your brother. I’m not going to tell you what to do about your own family.”

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me.

“But it’s my house too, Tam. I put my back into it. I want you to know I’m not giving it up quiet.”

“I know.”

“Whatever you decide, I’m with you. I just want you to know where I stand.”

That’s the most Dale has said in one breath since he proposed.