My Father Left the House to the Neighbor’s Kid, and My Brothers Wanted Me to Fight It

Part 1

Dad had been dead four hours when my oldest brother started dividing up the house.

We were still in the funeral home parking lot. Cars idling. My aunt crying into a Kleenex against the passenger window of a Buick.

Marcus stood by his truck with his phone out, already pulling up Zillow.

“Comps in that neighborhood are north of three-twenty,” he said. “Split three ways after the estate stuff, we’re each looking at maybe eighty, ninety.”

“Jesus, Marcus.” That was Dale, my middle brother. But he didn’t walk away. He leaned in to see the screen.

I stood there in the black dress I’d bought at Kohl’s the day before and I said nothing. I was thirty-eight years old and I had spent the last six years of my life in that house, sleeping on a twin bed in what used to be my childhood bedroom, driving Dad to the VA in Topeka every other Wednesday, learning how to change the dressing on a wound that would not close.

My brothers had visited twice a year. Christmas. Sometimes the Fourth.

“Rachel’s been living there,” Dale said, glancing at me. Not defending. Just noting.

“Right, and that’s fine,” Marcus said, in the voice he uses at his dealership when a customer is being difficult. “We’ll give her time to find a place. Sixty days is standard.”

Sixty days.

The reading of the will was Tuesday. A lawyer in Emporia named Curtis Vaughn, who had known my father since they were both nineteen and stationed at Fort Riley. Curtis had a small office above a State Farm agency and he asked us to sit down and offered us bottled water from a mini fridge that hummed too loud.

Marcus was already leaning forward.

Curtis read through the small things first. The truck to Dale. The tools to Marcus. Some savings bonds split evenly. A ring for me that had been my mother’s.

Then he came to the house.

He read it twice, actually. I remember that. He read it once to himself, quietly, his lips moving, and then he read it out loud.

The house on Sycamore, and the two acres it sat on, went to a boy named Tyler Bergen.

Nobody in that room was named Tyler Bergen.

Marcus’s face did a thing I had never seen it do before. Like a screen going dark.

“Who,” he said, and it was not a question, just a word, “the hell is Tyler Bergen.”

Curtis folded his hands. “The Bergens live next door to your father. Tyler is their son.”

“The neighbor kid.” Marcus laughed once, no humor in it. “The neighbor kid.”

“He’s twenty-two,” Curtis said, like that was somehow the relevant fact.

Dale had gone very still. He looked at me. “Did you know about this?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t feel my hands.

Marcus was already standing. “This is a joke. This has to be a joke. He was on morphine those last months, Curtis, you know that, he wasn’t in his right mind.”

“He signed it in February of last year,” Curtis said. “I was there. Two witnesses. He was not on any pain medication at that time. He drove himself to my office.”

Marcus turned to me. “Rachel.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You lived with him. You lived with him for six years and you didn’t know he was giving our house to some kid next door?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Then you find out.” His voice had gone quiet, which was worse than when he yelled. “You find out, Rachel, and we contest this. Undue influence. That kid worked on him. That kid saw an old sick widower and worked on him, and we are not letting a stranger walk off with our mother’s house.”

Dale nodded. He nodded like a man agreeing to something he had already decided.

“Rachel,” Marcus said. “You were there. You’re the witness. You are going to tell a judge what that kid was doing over there.”

I opened my mouth. I closed it.

Because the thing was, I did know Tyler Bergen. I knew him a little.

And I was starting to remember the afternoon in March, a year and a half ago, when I came home from the pharmacy and found my father sitting on the back porch with a boy in a hooded sweatshirt, and my father had been crying, and neither of them had said a word to me about why.