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

Part 2: What I Remembered About the Boy Next Door

The Bergens moved in the summer of 2009.

I wasn’t living at home then. I was in Kansas City, twenty-four years old, engaged to a man named Brian who sold commercial insurance and would eventually leave me for his college girlfriend two weeks before the wedding. I only knew the Bergens existed because my mother mentioned them on the phone. Nice family. Husband worked at the cement plant. Wife did hair out of the garage. A little boy, maybe seven or eight, who was too quiet.

That was the phrase she used. Too quiet.

Mom died in 2015. Pancreatic. Fast. Dad was sixty-eight and he never really came back from it, and by the time I moved home in 2018, after Brian and after the layoff and after the year I don’t like to talk about, Tyler Bergen was a lanky teenager who mowed Dad’s lawn every other Saturday for twenty dollars.

I paid him, most weeks. Dad would forget.

I remember him as polite. Not chatty. He’d knock on the back door for the money and he’d say thank you ma’am and he’d go. Once I asked him if he wanted a Coke and he said no thank you and I could tell he wanted one, but he said no anyway.

He was there more than I noticed at the time. That’s what I was starting to understand, sitting in Curtis Vaughn’s office with my brothers staring at me. He was there a lot.

He’d help Dad drag the trash cans up the driveway on Tuesday nights. He’d shovel the walk in winter without being asked. Once, when the water heater went out and I was at work, Tyler was the one who came over with his dad and figured out how to shut off the valve.

I’d thought of him as a helpful neighbor kid. A good one. The kind that makes you say, there are still some out there.

I had not thought of him as a son.

But somebody had.

We left Curtis’s office and Marcus wanted to go get a drink. He wanted to strategize, he said. He wanted to call a lawyer he knew in Wichita who did estate litigation. Dale was quieter, but he went with Marcus, and they both looked at me like they were waiting for me to get in the truck.

I said I’d meet them later. I said I needed to drive.

I drove to the house on Sycamore.

It was strange, letting myself in with the key I still had, knowing the house was not mine and had never been going to be mine and, it turned out, was not going to be my brothers’ either. I stood in the kitchen and I looked at the wallpaper my mother had picked out in 1994. Little blue teapots. I looked at the calendar still on the wall from the month Dad died, an appointment at the cardiologist circled in his shaky handwriting.

I looked at the back porch through the sliding door. The two chairs.

And I remembered.

March of last year. I’d been to CVS for Dad’s blood thinners. I came in through the front and I heard voices in the back, and I walked through the kitchen with the paper bag in my hand and I saw them through the glass.

Dad in his chair. Tyler in the other one. Both of them just sitting.

Dad’s face was wet. Not sobbing. Just wet, the way old men cry, like something is leaking out of them slowly.

Tyler was looking at the floorboards of the porch and his hands were between his knees.

I stood there with the CVS bag and I did not go outside. Some instinct I did not examine at the time told me not to.

I put the pills on the counter and I went upstairs.

Later, when Tyler had gone, I came down and Dad was making a sandwich. He asked me how the pharmacy was. I asked him what he and Tyler had been talking about.

He looked at me over the top of the bread and he said, “The boy’s just going through something. He needed to sit.”

That was all.

I hadn’t asked again. It hadn’t seemed like my business. I was tired most of the time in those years, tired in a way that made me not curious about other people’s pain.

Standing in the kitchen now, a year and a half later, with the house officially not mine, I thought about that afternoon and I felt something I could not name.

My phone rang. Marcus.

“Where are you.”

“At the house.”

“Come to Applebee’s. Dale and I are here. We need to talk about how you’re going to phrase this to the lawyer.”

“Marcus.”

“What.”

“I don’t know that I want to phrase anything.”

There was a long pause. I could hear the restaurant behind him. A TV playing football.

“Rachel.” His voice was doing the quiet thing again. “That house is worth three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. That is Mom’s house. That is where we grew up. And some kid we barely know is about to walk off with it because he was nice to a sick old man. You understand that, right?”

“I understand what it’s worth.”

“Then you understand what we have to do.”

I looked at the teapot wallpaper. I looked at the calendar.

“I’ll come to Applebee’s,” I said. “But I need to do something first.”

I hung up before he could answer. I walked out the back door and across the yard, through the gap in the hedge where the fence had rotted out years ago, and I knocked on the Bergens’ kitchen door.

Tyler answered.

He’d grown into his height. He was wearing a Chiefs sweatshirt and he had not shaved in a couple of days, and when he saw me his whole face changed, went pale, and I understood in that instant that he knew. He knew about the will. He’d probably known before I did.

“Miss Rachel,” he said.

“Can I come in.”

He stepped back and let me into the kitchen. His mother wasn’t home. The house smelled like coffee and dryer sheets.

“I know you know,” I said.

He nodded. He was looking at the linoleum.

“When did he tell you.”

“Last summer. He said he was going to. He asked me if I wanted him to.”

“And you said yes.”

Tyler’s jaw worked. “I said, only if it wasn’t going to hurt anybody.”

I almost laughed. I put my hand on the back of one of the kitchen chairs to hold myself up.

“Tyler,” I said, “it’s going to hurt somebody.”

He nodded. His eyes were wet.

“My brothers want to contest the will. They want to argue that you took advantage of him. That you influenced him. They want me to testify about what I saw.”

His face when I said that. God. He looked like somebody had opened a door in him and let all the air out.

“I didn’t ask him for it,” he said. “Miss Rachel, I swear to God, I didn’t ask him for anything. I told him no. I told him no three times.”

“I believe you.”

“He kept saying, the boys don’t need it. He kept saying, they have their lives. He said, Rachel will land on her feet, she always does. And Tyler, you don’t have anybody who’s going to.”

I closed my eyes.

“He said what,” I said.

“He said, you don’t have anybody who’s going to leave you anything. And I said, Mr. Wells, that’s not, you don’t have to. And he said, I know I don’t have to.”

I stood in the Bergen kitchen and I thought about my father sitting on the porch with this boy, this quiet boy from next door whose mother did hair in the garage, and I thought about the word Dad used, boys.

The boys don’t need it.

Meaning Marcus and Dale.

Not meaning Tyler. Tyler was something else to him. Tyler was, apparently, the boy.

I opened my eyes.

“Tyler. What was he to you.”

He didn’t answer for a long time. He walked to the coffee pot and poured himself a cup he was not going to drink and he stood there with his back to me.

“My dad left when I was nine,” he said. “You probably didn’t know that. He didn’t leave leave. He’s around. He works at the plant. But he wasn’t, I don’t know how to say it, he wasn’t a dad. He wasn’t the dad kind of dad.”

I waited.

“Your dad used to pay me twenty dollars to mow the lawn. And one time when I was, I think fourteen, he asked me if I wanted to help him rebuild the deck instead. He said he’d pay me the same but it’d take all summer. And I said okay. And that whole summer, every Saturday, he’d have lemonade in the fridge for me and he’d show me how to use the miter saw and he’d ask me about school. He’d ask me things like, do you have a girl you like. Do you know what you want to be. Are you eating enough.”

Tyler’s voice broke on the word eating. He didn’t turn around.

“Nobody asked me that stuff, Miss Rachel. Nobody.”

I stood in the kitchen and I did not go to him because I didn’t know him well enough, and I hated that I didn’t know him well enough. I hated that this boy had been growing up ten yards from my father’s back porch and I had thought of him as the kid who mowed the lawn.

“He didn’t want you to know,” Tyler said, still facing the coffee pot. “He said you had enough on you. He said your brothers wouldn’t understand. He said he’d handle it himself, in the will, and it would just be done, and you’d all move on.”

“That was a stupid plan,” I said.

Tyler laughed, a wet ugly laugh. “Yeah. I told him that too.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Marcus. I let it go.

“Tyler.” I waited until he turned around. “My brothers are going to fight this. It’s going to be ugly. They’re going to bring up things about my dad, about his mental state, about you, they’re going to say things that aren’t true. Are you ready for that.”

He looked at me. Twenty-two years old. Chiefs sweatshirt. His father’s son by proximity and nothing else.

“I don’t want the house,” he said. “I never wanted the house. I just wanted him to stop being sad.”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

He was quiet for a long time.

“What do you want me to do, Miss Rachel.”

And that was the thing, wasn’t it. That was the thing I had driven over here to figure out, and I still didn’t know.

My phone buzzed again.