My Sister Sold Our Mother’s House Three Days After the Funeral, But She Forgot Who Signed the Deed

Part 1

The realtor’s sign went up in the front yard on a Tuesday, and my mother had been in the ground for exactly three days.

I saw it from the driveway. I’d come to water the tomatoes because Mom would have wanted somebody to, and there it was, a red and white plastic rectangle staked into the lawn she’d mowed herself until the week she went into hospice.

FOR SALE. Coming Soon. Call Rebecca at Keller Williams.

My sister Danielle’s realtor. Of course.

I sat down on the front step. It was July, ninety-two degrees, and I remember the heat coming up off the concrete through my jeans. I remember the smell of the boxwood by the door. I remember thinking, very calmly, that I was going to ruin her.

Which is not a thing I’ve ever thought before about another human being. Especially not my little sister.

Let me back up.

Our mother, Diane Whitaker, died on a Saturday morning at sixty-eight from ovarian cancer that we’d known about for fourteen months. She lived in the same brick ranch in Belleville, Illinois that our dad had bought in 1987. Three bedrooms. A finished basement. A backyard with the tomato cages and the swing set my father built before he died in 2009.

Danielle lives in Chicago. She’s thirty-four, a marketing director, married to a man named Kyle who makes even more than she does. I’m thirty-eight, divorced, and I live twenty minutes from Mom’s house in a rental I share with my daughter Emma. I’m a school nurse. I make sixty-one thousand dollars a year.

For the fourteen months Mom was sick, I drove to her house every day after work. I gave her the injections. I did the meal prep. I sat with her through the bad nights. Danielle came down twice, both times for a weekend, both times with a bottle of wine and a lot of theories about integrative medicine.

I’m not saying this to complain. I loved my mother and I would have done it whether Danielle showed up or not. I’m just saying it because it matters for what comes next.

At the funeral on Saturday, Danielle read a poem. She cried in the good way, the way that makes strangers touch your shoulder. Kyle wore a navy suit. Afterwards, at the reception in the church basement, she pulled me aside by the coffee urn.

“We should talk about the house,” she said.

I said, “Not today.”

She said, “Just, when you’re ready. Kyle and I have been thinking. It’s a lot to maintain. And with the market where it is.”

I remember watching a woman I didn’t know eat a piece of Jell-O salad from a paper plate. I remember thinking Danielle had lost weight and her lipstick was very good.

“Not today, Danielle.”

She said okay. She squeezed my hand. She said she loved me.

That was Saturday.

The sign went up Tuesday.

I sat on the step for I don’t know how long. Then I stood up and I let myself in with my key, the key I’d had for the entire duration of my mother’s illness because I was the one who came every day, and I went to my mother’s bedroom, and I opened the top drawer of her dresser.

Underneath a stack of birthday cards, in a plain white envelope, was the piece of paper I’d been thinking about since I saw the sign.

I unfolded it on the bed where Mom used to fold laundry. I read it twice.

Then I got in my car and drove to the Recorder of Deeds in downtown Belleville, and I asked the woman behind the counter for a certified copy of the deed to 4412 Sycamore Lane.

She printed it out. She stamped it. She slid it across the counter.

I looked at it.

I looked at the name on it.

And I understood, standing there under those fluorescent lights with the deed in my hand and the funeral flowers still wilting in the trunk of my car, that my sister had made a very serious mistake.

She had forgotten to ask a simple question before she called her realtor.

She had forgotten to ask whose house it actually was.

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