For Six Years I Drove My Mother to Dialysis. At the Will Reading, My Brothers Learned What She Left Me.

Part 3: The Hampton Inn

I made him wait until Sunday.

Not out of strategy. I just did not have it in me. Saturday I slept twelve hours in my mother’s recliner with an afghan over my legs, and when I woke up it was dark and I did not know what day it was for a full minute.

Sunday morning Michael called. Not Kevin. Michael.

“Rach. Can I come by. Just me.”

“Where’s Kevin.”

“Sulking. Brittany took the kids to the Biltmore. I’ve got a couple hours.”

He showed up at eleven with two coffees from the drive-through and a bag of powdered donuts. He handed me my coffee, cream no sugar, correct, which surprised me.

We sat at the kitchen table. Our mother’s kitchen table. The one with the burn mark from 1994 where I’d set down a curling iron.

Michael did not look at me right away. He looked at the burn mark.

“Kevin wants to fight it.”

“I figured.”

“I’m not going to.”

I did not say anything. I let him get there himself.

“I read the letter.” He turned his coffee cup in his hands. “She wrote me one too. It wasn’t, um. It wasn’t as nice as I’d hoped.”

“What did it say.”

He almost laughed. “She said I was a good boy who married a woman who taught me that love was a scheduling problem. She said she was proud of my career. She said she wished I’d called on Sundays instead of sending money on birthdays.”

He looked up.

“She was right about the money on birthdays. I did that. I sent her a Visa gift card every October. I told myself she liked being able to pick her own thing.”

“She kept them in the drawer by the phone. She never spent any of them.”

He put his face in his hands.

I let him sit like that for a minute. Then I got up and got him a paper towel from the roll because our mother had never believed in tissues.

“Michael. I didn’t ask her to do this.”

“I know you didn’t.” He wiped his face. “Kevin knows too. He just can’t say it. Kevin thinks if he says it out loud it means he was wrong, and Kevin has not been wrong since 1986.”

“What are you going to do.”

“I’m going to tell Kevin to drop it. I’m going to fly home tonight. And I’m going to call you on Sundays. If that’s okay.”

“It’s okay.”

He stood up. He hugged me, badly, the way brothers hug, all shoulder and no give. Then he stopped at the door.

“Was she scared. At the end.”

I thought about it. Really thought.

“She was scared for a long time. I don’t know if she was scared at the end. She made coffee. She set out my mug. I don’t know if she knew, but she was ready if she did.”

He nodded. He left.

I did not tell him about the eighteen thousand dollars in the freezer.

Kevin came over that afternoon without calling.

I heard the rental car in the driveway and I saw him through the window, sitting there a full three minutes with his hands on the wheel before he got out. He looked older than he had on Friday. His suit was gone. He was in jeans and a golf polo and his hair was flatter on one side, like he had slept on it wrong.

He rang the doorbell instead of using the garage code. That was new.

I let him in. He stood in the entryway.

“Can I come in.”

“You’re in, Kevin.”

“Right.”

We went to the living room. He did not sit in the recliner, which was Mom’s, which I appreciated. He sat on the loveseat, which used to be Dad’s, and he looked around the room like he was seeing it for the first time.

“Michael talked to me.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not going to contest it.”

“Okay.”

He rubbed his jaw. “I need to say something and I need you to just let me say it without, without doing the thing where you go quiet and make me keep talking.”

“I’ll try.”

He took a breath.

“I was mad because I thought she picked you. I was mad because I have been telling myself for six years that I was the good son because I called on birthdays and I sent flowers on Mother’s Day and I paid for her Medicare supplement, and it turns out none of that counted, and you were here, and I was not, and I could not stand knowing that. So I made it about the house. Because it is easier to be mad about a house than about the other thing.”

He stopped. He waited. I did not fill the silence.

He looked down at his hands.

“That’s it. That’s, that’s the whole thing.”

I let it sit a minute. Long enough that he shifted on the loveseat.

Then I said, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I heard you.”

“That’s it?”

“Kevin. I’m not going to tell you it’s fine. It’s not fine. You asked me for the garage code before you asked me how I was doing. On the morning of her funeral.”

His mouth opened. Closed.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “That’s what I’ve got right now.”

He nodded slowly. He stood up. At the door he stopped and turned.

“The Medicare supplement thing. That was real, right? I did pay for that.”

“You paid for it, Kevin.”

“Okay.”

He left.

I locked the door behind him. Then I went back to the recliner and sat down, and I picked up the remote, and I turned on HGTV, because it was what she would have done, and because the house was mine now, and I could sit in her chair and watch her show and no one on earth could tell me I was doing it wrong.

I did not know yet what I was going to do with the house.

I did not know yet whether Kevin was going to call again, or whether I was going to answer if he did.

But I knew what I was going to do on Tuesday morning.

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