Holmes County, Ohio

They cruised through the rolling land Izzie had spent half her childhood in, Jason at the wheel. The familiar shades of green and brown zipped by, flowing into each other like the folds of a long dress. Ahead, a caution sign warned them to watch for horses and buggies.

It was silent in the car. Izzie hadn’t seen her brother in two years, and in the first five minutes of their drive from the airport to Berlin, they had exhausted the topics of weather (it was sunny), health (they were both well), and careers (Jason was managing a Barnes and Noble, and Izzie was teaching middle school). If it weren’t for her sister’s wedding, Izzie would be home in Raleigh, not riding in a car with her long-lost older brother.

Izzie watched Jason out of the corner of her eye. Sitting beside him, all she could think of was the night seventeen years ago when, at the age of thirteen, Jason discovered their father’s affair. She could hear Jason’s voice, fluctuating with the height and depth of adolescence, shouting accusations; she could feel the thud of his head hitting the other side of the wall from where she sat on her bed.

Jason adjusted the collar of his white dress shirt and took his eyes off the road long enough to find a microscopic piece of lint on his pants and pull it off. He drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel.

“So Isabelle—” “Izzie,” she interrupted.

“Pardon?”

Izzie ran a hand through her hair, watched the red strands fall down into her eyes, then blew them out of her sight. A few came back down and got stuck in her mascara. She would have to take this makeup off as soon as possible. And these high heels.

“I go by Izzie now, remember? I told you at Aunt Ethel’s funeral.”

Jason took his hands off the wheel and held them up defensively.

“Sorry.” Why was she so irritated at his blunder? she wondered. She supposed that, like many of her pet peeves, she could trace it back to her father. Growing up, he had refused her repeated requests to call her Izzie.

“I gave you a name for a reason,” he’d said once. “No sense butchering a decent name.”

“So anyway, Izzie,” Jason said. “What else is going on in your life? A boyfriend, maybe?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

How many times can we say the same thing? Izzie thought. She didn’t feel like telling Jason that she’d had a boyfriend until a week ago. That had ended when Izzie concluded that her boyfriend was just like her father—and not just because they were both military men. No, she’d tried to overlook that similarity at first. But he had a temper like her father, stubbornness like her father, and no sense of humor, just like her father. She was only 27 and wasn’t desperate. Besides, she would rather stay single her whole life than marry her father.

Ahead, the town of Berlin came into view. The “Welcome to Berlin” sign greeted them with a painting that was both stereotypical and accurate—a large orange sun setting behind a barn and silo, rolling hills of green and brown, and a small copse of trees in fall colors. There were no fall colors now, in June, but otherwise Izzie could look past the sign and see the same scenery. “Home of the world’s largest Amish community,” the sign told them, and “Birthplace of Atlee Pomerene—U.S. senator,” as if everyone knew who that was.

Izzie pictured herself at ten or eleven or twelve, riding in her aunt and uncle’s station wagon, pretending it was a horse and buggy. She’d pretend she was Amish, like some of the farmers outside the town, or like the ones who worked in Berlin’s hotels and bed and breakfasts—the men with their full beards and old-fashioned manners, and the women with their hair carefully pinned and covered, their tennis shoes poking out from under their dresses.

Izzie and her sister Lydia had moved to their Uncle Scott and Aunt Barbara’s farm when Izzie was ten and Lydia was eight, after their father left them. Their mother had a breakdown and died a year later, so Izzie and her five siblings were split between aunts and uncles. Izzie wondered if Jason ever felt guilty for being the one who discovered their father’s affair, pushing their family into chaos.

Jason drove slowly through town to the bed and breakfast their aunt and uncle bought nine years ago when they sold their farm, just after Izzie moved out. Their aunt met them at the door, her graying hair short and curled. She ushered them inside, talking nonstop about the shops closing downtown, about the late frost that killed so many crops, about the new minister at church. She interrupted herself with questions about Izzie’s flight and her work in Raleigh.

Izzie tried to insert answers in between her aunt’s questions while her uncle hugged her, his arms still powerful, his lined face still stern.

He put her at arm’s length. “Have you grown?” he asked.

Izzie felt an obligation to smile, though she thought the comment was a little patronizing. “I’m a little old for that, Uncle Scott. It’s the heels.”

She lifted up one foot to show off the tan shoe, almost lost her balance, and steadied herself against the wall. Her uncle laughed, and Jason and her aunt turned to look.

“So, you turned into a fashionable lady after all,” her uncle said.

“No.” Izzie rolled her eyes and wished she’d worn tennis shoes. “I wore them for Lydia. I thought she’d like them.”

“What about me?” Izzie’s sister Lydia stepped into the hallway.

She looked like a soon-to-be bride. But then, she’d always looked that way, with her slender frame, shining eyes, and full lips. Not Izzie. She was heavier, her face round and her eyes small. She preferred to think of her face as heart-shaped, but when she had relayed this information to her first boyfriend, several years ago, he had responded with something like, “Your heart melts mine.” Sappy. Complete nonsense.

Izzie ran the rest of the way down the hall, her heels pounding on the wooden floor. She hoped they wouldn’t leave dents. She wrapped her arms around her sister, and Lydia squeezed back. Of Izzie’s five siblings, Lydia was the only one she was close to because they had been kept together when the family split apart.

“Hey, Mark,” Lydia called as they untangled their arms.

A man Izzie recognized from the pictures her sister had sent her stepped out of the dining room into the hall. His face was narrow—well really, his whole body was somehow narrow—and he was wearing a green and yellow sweater vest.

“Hi, I’m Mark,” he said, and adjusted his rectangular glasses. He stuck out his hand as if in an afterthought.

Izzie took it and was surprised to find his handshake firm. “Izzie,” she said.

He nodded. “I’m Lydia’s boyfriend. I mean, fiancé.” Lydia giggled and bumped him with her hip. “Get it right.” '

Izzie’s uncle crowded into the circle and clapped a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “You’re gonna have to learn a new word tomorrow. Husband.”

A woman Izzie didn’t recognize bustled into the hall, and Izzie started to feel claustrophobic. The woman began asking Lydia rapid-fire questions about flowers and centerpieces. The wedding director, Izzie guessed. Lydia followed the director out of the hall. She looked over her shoulder at Izzie.

“Sorry. I’ll be back. Hey—the boys are in the basement.”

It took Izzie a moment to register that “the boys” were her younger brothers. Izzie sighed. She should probably go talk to them.

Izzie wandered around until she found the basement stairs. The house was large, and she had only visited a couple of times. Her heels were clacking again as she descended the stairs, and she worried she would lose her balance and roll to the bottom.

Her three younger brothers, the two from Kansas and the one from Indiana, were gathered around the pool table, cue sticks and Coke cans in hand.

“Hi,” she said, unsure how to proceed. She hardly knew them. They were all six years old or younger when their father left.

James, Izzie’s Indiana brother, the youngest, handed her a cue stick. “Hey, Izzie.”

“No thanks,” she said and tried to hand it back. She wasn’t planning to stay down here long. She was thinking, What do I talk about with brothers I don’t know? It was uncomfortable to admit she was related to someone she hardly remembered.

“Come on, we need even teams,” James said.

Her Kansas brothers, Jake and Josh, urged her to play, and she gave in. At least as long as they were playing, she wouldn’t be expected to talk the whole time.

She took a vicious shot that went wildly off target. What had possessed her parents to give all their sons names that started with “J”? Probably her father’s idea. So he would have fewer consonants to remember.

The basement stairs creaked, and Izzie saw Jason enter the room, a bottle of water in his hand. Fiji water. The water of the hydraulically enlightened. That might make a nice slogan.

“What?” Jason flung his arms wide as if he was planning to hug the whole room.

Izzie shook her head and looked away. She hadn’t realized she was glaring at him. Jason started talking politics with Jake, and soon Jason was making a vehement case for the Iraq war.

“I don’t see why it’s our business.” Izzie lined up her shot, one eye closed, carefully aiming.

“There’s injustice going on and you just want to sit still?” Jason said.

Izzie made her shot and watched the ball bounce off the wall, just shy of the pocket. She straightened up.

“You can’t fix every problem, Jason. Sometimes fixing it just makes it worse.” Izzie wasn’t really thinking about war or politics. She heard her blood in her ears and wondered if Jason knew she was wishing he’d never played the sleuth to find out where their father went late at night. And if he had to find out, why hadn’t he just kept it to himself?

If Jason understood, he didn’t show it. He was already changing the subject to the question of ethics in interrogation methods.

Izzie handed Jason her cue and hurried upstairs.

In the living room, Izzie’s aunt and uncle were talking to people Izzie recognized as distant relatives, cousins of some sort, who were describing a recent trip to Italy. Apparently, it was a thrilling vacation; at least, so Izzie assumed based on the exaggerated gestures her second or third cousin was making. The relatives weren’t paying attention, so Izzie hurried past them onto the front porch, hoping no one would be there. The porch, with its white railings, wound its way around the side of the house. Izzie settled into one of the swings that hung from the ceiling, arranging the cushions around her and rocking slightly to get the swing moving.

It was quiet here. At night, on her uncle’s farm, the silence had been complete, allowing space for more thought than Izzie had wanted at first. In the end, it was the land that adopted her. Its soft creases and gentle bends had held her and made her feel safe.

Lydia stepped onto the porch an hour later. Izzie watched her sister’s feet lift lightly across the white floorboards, as if she was dancing. Lydia curled up on the other side of the swing, bare feet tucked neatly under her, and said, “Something’s eating you, Izzie.”

Izzie looked past Lydia’s head at a chipped area in the porch railing where dark wood showed through.

“You sure know how to start a conversation,” she said.

Lydia smiled, showing off her white teeth, perfectly straight like Jason’s. “Come on, Izzie. It’s written all over your face.”

Izzie toyed with the chain rings of the swing. “Dad isn’t coming, is he?”

Lydia shook her head. “He’s in Scotland with his, um…his wife.”

Izzie winced internally but hoped she hid it on the outside. She hated hearing about their father’s second wife. True, their mother was dead now, but she hadn’t been dead when he married this woman.

The swing creaked out a soothing rhythm.

“Lydia, are you sure about this—about Mark?”

Lydia’s smile receded, like a tide going out.

Izzie thought she’d made a mistake and tried to explain. “Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s not—nothing—just making sure. He seems a little mousey.”

Izzie was certain she had just made matters worse. Lydia said nothing for a moment, just looked out toward the road.

“This is about Dad, isn’t it?” she said, finally.

Izzie didn’t answer, afraid of saying something more offensive than she already had. Lydia seemed to take her silence as a yes anyway.

“It’s not going to happen to me.”

“You were young when it happened.” Izzie got up from the swing. “You probably don’t even remember it very well.”

“I’m only two years younger than you,” Lydia said, staying seated. “I remember everything.”

They watched each other, and Izzie thought that Lydia must have put the past into some little box that she opened when she needed to remember and closed when she wanted to forget.

Izzie ate three rolls in succession at the rehearsal dinner in the church basement. She was feeling frazzled, and dinner rolls were her favorite food. There were too many relatives to keep track of, people who said they knew her when she was “this tall,” or who claimed to have changed her diapers. And there were people that, by rights, she should have known. Was she the only one bothered by the fact that James was eleven the last time she saw him? Now he was seventeen. Her own brother—and she’d seen him twice since he was an infant.

Jason sat down cattycorner to Izzie and dug into his pot roast. He glanced over at Izzie and put down his fork.

“Okay. What did I do?” he said.

“What do you mean?” Izzie said around a bite of roll.

“You’ve been looking at me like you want to kill me since you got here.”

“There will be no murder at this table.” Their uncle set his plate on the table and tried to squeeze himself in beside Jason, across from Izzie.

He pushed Jason halfway off his chair before he managed to get into his own seat. Jason moved his chair over a few inches, accommodating their uncle’s large shoulders.

“Isabelle,” he said, “been thinking about you lately.”

Izzie looked up from her fourth roll in surprise. She was not the devoted sister who stayed behind. She had charged off to college nine years ago, leaving Berlin behind. Why should he think about her?

Her uncle shoveled a forkful of green beans into his mouth. “Don’t look so surprised. I half-raised you.” He paused and pointed his fork at her. “You seem to have turned out fine.”

“Why shouldn’t I have?”

Her uncle laughed. “You were a rambunctious child.”

“Not really.” Izzie almost told him that he had never understood her, not in the eight years she’d lived with him.

“Not really?” Her uncle laughed again, louder, and Jason looked over. “You chased my cows.”

Case in point, thought Izzie, but she didn’t bother to say so. He would only laugh harder if she told him what she was thinking that day. That time she chased the cows was shortly after she’d moved to Berlin. Before then, she’d never been to church, but her aunt and uncle insisted that she go. At Millersburg United Methodist Church one of those first Sundays, the minister preached on the old covenant God made with Israel. He described the sacrificial law. If you wanted God to forgive you, the minister said, you brought a cow to Him and killed it for your sins. He never got around to explaining the new covenant. Later that afternoon Izzie tried to lasso a cow. Driving by in his pickup, her uncle caught her on horseback, the cows running in confusion. She refused to tell him why she did it and received a spanking in silence. At age ten it made sense.

“I just took everything literally,” she said.

“What’s this cow story?” Jason said, but she ignored him. It was just another reminder that their lives were so separate.

“But Isabelle,” her uncle said, “I just heard the other day that they’re looking for a middle school teacher over at Flat Ridge. Thought I’d tell you.”

Izzie leaned back in her chair. Was that her uncle’s way of asking her to come back to Berlin? And if it was, did she want to come back? Ohio did have a feeling like home. When she saw the curves of the land, the little towns that thought themselves important, the cows with their calm ambivalence, she felt a nostalgia like homesickness. But it was a homesickness that lacked a home.

She nodded. “Thanks.”

Even as she said it, she knew she could never live in Berlin again. For her, it was tainted. She would never just see cows and barns and relatives. Behind them she would always see what brought her here—the lies and unfaithfulness and death; and the brother who tried too hard to do the right thing.

“What cow story?” said Jason, and her uncle launched into his side of the story.

The next morning, Izzie and Lydia shared the bathroom mirror. Lydia was applying makeup, and Izzie was trying to straighten her hair.

“So,” Lydia said, “have you forgiven me for getting married?”

Typical Lydia, Izzie thought. Opening a conversation with candor.

“There was never anything to forgive. I’m just scared for you.”

Lydia turned toward Izzie, one eye complete with eye liner, the other bare. It gave her a crazed, off-kilter look, like a buccaneer who got out of the wrong side of the bed.

“I’m not Mom,” Lydia said, “and I think I picked good, Miss protective-big-sister.”

Lydia went back to her makeup, but kept glancing at Izzie.

“Well,” Lydia said after a few minutes, “clearly we’ve still not gotten to the root of the matter.”

Lydia asked no question, but Izzie heard it implied, so she attacked her own hair with the straightener and said, “Jason.”

Lydia paused with a tube of lipstick in her hand and looked at Izzie in the mirror. “It wasn’t his fault,” she said quietly. “It would have happened sooner or later.”

Izzie frowned. That was what she had been trying to tell herself for years.

“Izzie, you can’t blame Jason.”

“I know. But I do.”

Izzie ran the straightener through her hair once, then slammed it on the counter. She left the bathroom without explanation, seeking Jason. Seventeen years was far too long to go without explanation. She wandered the house until she found him in the basement playing pool with himself, already dressed in his suit and tie. Izzie was still in her bathrobe, hair half styled.

“Jason.” He turned around, cue stick in hand.

“I need to know.” Izzie crossed her arms. “Why did you tell on Dad?”

Jason leaned over the table and took a shot. It didn’t look like he was aiming at anything. “Ah. So that’s what this is all about.”

The balls bounced off the sides in random directions, bumping into each other as they went. “Why?” Izzie repeated. She stepped over to the pool table and stood over him as he occupied himself with another shot.

He glanced up at her. “Because it was the right thing to do, that’s why. You can’t do what he did and get away with it.”

“Get away with it? He did get away with it.”

Jason abandoned his shot and poked Izzie gently in the chest with his cue stick. “I am not the one who left the family, Izzie,” he said quietly. “I am not the one who left.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point, Izzie?” He leaned down and shot again, and then straightened up, his back to the ricocheting balls.

“The point is that Mom died. The point is that I don’t even know you… or any of the boys.” Izzie felt tears coming, but she refused to cry in front of Jason. He was gripping his cue, his knuckles turning white, which told her she was having some effect. She swallowed and said evenly, “The point is, you ruined everything.”

Jason threw the cue on the ground at Izzie’s feet. He glared at the stick and drew in one long, shaking breath, and heaved it back out. Izzie took a step back and wondered if she’d gone too far.

“Any other points?” he said, almost inaudibly.

“That Dad is in Scotland,” Izzie said, feeling compelled to finish her list, “and he doesn’t have to live with the consequences.”

Jason looked up, and the fierceness in his eyes sent Izzie back another step.

“You really think I thought of all that?” Jason asked. “I was thirteen.”

He bent down and picked up the cue, placing it gently on the pool table. “You don’t think I know all that happened because of me?”

Izzie felt a churning in her stomach, like her breakfast didn’t want to sit still. He was asking her to see his perspective, and she wasn’t sure she could handle it.

“It’s like your dumb cow story,” he said. “What were you thinking? I don’t know—you were ten. You probably didn’t think it through very well.”

Izzie turned and scrambled up the stairs, feeling like a child caught listening to adult conversations she didn’t want to understand.

Later in the morning, Izzie stood in the church and listened to Lydia and Mark exchange vows. She gripped her bouquet of daisies and stared unblinking at Lydia while the other two bridesmaids—friends of Lydia’s— sniffled like they were at a funeral.

Lydia cooed her “I do’s,” her large eyes even larger; and Mark said that he did as well, his voice quiet, struggling to be heard, a goofy grin plastered on his face.

How had her parents said it? Izzie wondered. She couldn’t imagine her father saying it like Mark or looking as happy as Mark. When she tried to visualize her father in his wedding, she heard him bark out his wedding vows like a drill sergeant.

Mark and Lydia leaned in for their kiss, and Izzie looked down at the toes of the pink high heels that Lydia had insisted she wear. Such an easy promise to make, and so easily broken.

They cut the cake and drank champagne, and Lydia and Mark hurried toward their waiting car, hands clasped tightly. Lydia stopped in front of the car and let go of Mark’s hand to grab Izzie’s arm. Lydia had to stand on her tiptoes to whisper in her sister’s ear.

“Let it go.”

Izzie nodded. “Be careful.” Lydia took hold of both her sister’s hands.

“Izzie. Mark is not our dad.”

Izzie swallowed. She wanted to say something nice to Lydia, something about how lovely she looked or how happy her life would be, but Izzie’s throat closed.

Lydia smiled, just a little. “Promise me one thing. Be nice to Jason.”

Izzie got her mouth open, and said, “I promise.” She even tried to smile.

Lydia winked and climbed into the car. Mark picked up some of her wedding dress that had fallen out of the car and stuffed it into Lydia’s lap before he shut the door. The car disappeared down the street, and Izzie turned to see Jason behind her, arms crossed.

“I’m under orders to be nice,” she said.

“Ah.” Jason pulled off his tie, “Lydia, the family conscience.”

“If I could be more sincere, I would.”

“Smile!” They turned and saw their aunt with a camera aimed their direction.

Izzie groaned and started to turn away, but Jason held her arm.

“Just smile and pretend you like me,” he said. “Maybe someday we’ll look back and forget.”

The fields and pastures between Berlin and Millersburg looked the same on the way back to the airport as they had coming. The car crested a hill, and an Amish buggy came into view, inching its way along the road. Jason hit the brakes and then zipped around it. He glanced over at Izzie.

“Sorry I threw the cue at you.”

Izzie smiled with the very edges of her mouth. “It didn’t hit me.”

Jason pulled a pair of sunglasses from the visor above his head and put them on, defense against the bright sunlight. Outside, a field of cows grazed, ignoring their car, minding their own business. The sun was glinting off a silo in the distance, before the cows and the silo disappeared behind another undulation in the land. One hollow dip in the scenery concealed the next, green and brown confetti in the folds of a long, long dress.

First published in 2012 in The Ivy Leaves Journal of Literature and Art, vol. 86, p. 78-86.