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

Part 3: The Deck

I did not go to Applebee’s that night.

I sat in my car in the Bergens’ driveway for a long time and then I drove out past the county line and I parked at the pull-off by the reservoir where my dad used to take us fishing, and I sat in the dark with the engine off until my hands stopped shaking.

I was thinking about the deck.

I had helped build parts of that deck too. I didn’t remember it well because I’d been in and out that summer, house-hunting with Brian, coming home for weekends. But I remembered walking out onto it one Sunday in August and finding Dad and a skinny fourteen-year-old kid staining boards, and Dad had straightened up and said, this is Tyler, he’s a hell of a worker.

I remembered thinking, that’s nice, Dad has help.

I had not thought, that boy is starving for something my father has to give.

I turned the car back on and I drove home. Not to Sycamore. To my apartment above the flower shop on Main, the one-bedroom I’d kept as an address technically even though I hadn’t really lived there in six years. I made coffee and I sat on the couch and I called Marcus at ten thirty at night.

He picked up on the first ring.

“Where the hell have you been.”

“Marcus, I’m not going to testify.”

Silence.

“What.”

“I’m not going to testify. I’m not going to help you contest the will. Dad knew what he was doing.”

“Rachel.”

“He knew what he was doing. He signed it a year and a half ago. He drove himself to Curtis’s office. He wasn’t confused, Marcus, he was making a decision.”

“To give our mother’s house to a stranger.”

“He wasn’t a stranger to Dad.”

I heard Marcus breathing. I heard Dale’s voice in the background, asking what was happening.

“You know what, Rachel.” Marcus’s voice was going to a place I had heard it go before, at Christmas in 2019, when I told him I was moving in with Dad and he said, so what, you’re just going to give up your life. “You know what I think. I think you were there for six years and you did the work, and I get that, I do. And now Dad shafted you the same as he shafted us, and instead of getting mad, you’re rolling over. Because that’s what you do, Rachel. You roll over. You did it with Brian and you did it at that job in Kansas City and now you’re doing it with our inheritance.”

I let that sit.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I was in the room enough to understand something you weren’t.”

“Oh, here we go.”

“Dad wasn’t shafting anybody, Marcus. He gave you the truck you actually wanted. He gave Dale the tools. He gave me Mom’s ring, which is the only thing in that house I ever asked about. And he gave the house to somebody who needed a father and didn’t have one.”

“That is the corniest, most Hallmark, bullshit,”

“I know how it sounds.”

“Rachel, that is eighty thousand dollars. Each. That is Emma’s college. That is my second location. That is real money for real people.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you doing this.”

I looked at the coffee going cold in my hand.

“Because I was there in March of last year and I saw them sitting on the porch,” I said. “And I didn’t ask what they were talking about. And I should have. And I’m not going to sit in a courtroom now and tell a judge that a conversation I didn’t bother to have was undue influence.”

Marcus hung up on me.

He didn’t speak to me for four months.

Dale called me two days later. He wasn’t as angry as Marcus. Dale never is. He asked me if I was sure, and I said I was, and he was quiet for a while and then he said, “Rach, do you know what it feels like to find out your dad picked somebody else.”

I said, “Dale, he didn’t pick somebody else. He picked somebody extra.”

“That’s not how it feels.”

“I know.”

“I mowed that lawn too when I was a kid.”

His voice cracked on that and I understood, suddenly, that this was not really about the money for Dale. For Marcus, maybe. But not for Dale.

“I know you did,” I said.

“I hated it. I hated every Saturday. And this kid did it and got the house.”

“Dale.”

“I know. I know how that sounds. I know.”

He was quiet for a long time.

“I’m not going to fight it either,” he said finally. “I told Marcus this morning. I’m out.”

“Okay.”

“But I don’t want to meet that kid, Rachel. I don’t want to shake his hand at Christmas. I’m not there yet.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe not ever.”

“Okay, Dale.”

Marcus did file, in the end. By himself. His lawyer in Wichita wrote a letter to Curtis Vaughn making noises about undue influence and diminished capacity, and Curtis wrote back with the medical records and the notarized affidavits and the fact that my father had, on the day he signed the will, also renewed his driver’s license and argued with a clerk at the DMV about whether his address was spelled correctly, and Marcus’s lawyer sent him a bill for four thousand dollars and told him it wasn’t going anywhere.

Marcus paid the bill. He did not call me.

The house went to Tyler in September.

I had to move out. Sixty days, which was funny, because that was what Marcus had originally offered me. I found a little place on the east side of town, a duplex, cheaper than my apartment above the flower shop because it was further from downtown. I took Mom’s ring and the calendar off the kitchen wall and the box of photographs from the hall closet, and I left everything else.

Tyler came by the day I was loading the last of it into my Corolla.

He stood in the driveway with his hands in his pockets.

“Miss Rachel.”

“Just Rachel. Please.”

“Rachel.” He tried it out. “I wanted to. I have something for you.”

He handed me an envelope. Thick. I opened it.

It was a check. From Tyler Bergen. For forty thousand dollars.

“What is this.”

“It’s half of what the house would appraise for, minus what I need for the roof, it needs a roof, and property taxes for a couple of years. My mom helped me figure it out.”

“Tyler.”

“I don’t want it all,” he said. “I never wanted it all. I want a place to live and I want to fix it up the way he was going to and I want to. I just want somewhere. But I don’t need the whole thing. And you did the six years, Rachel. I saw you do the six years. Everybody on this block saw you do the six years.”

I held the check.

“Tyler, this is your inheritance.”

“He gave it to me to do what I wanted with. This is what I want.”

I stood in the driveway of the house I had grown up in and I held a check from a twenty-two-year-old boy in a Chiefs sweatshirt, and I thought about my father saying, Rachel will land on her feet, she always does.

He had been wrong about that, actually. I had not always landed on my feet.

But he had made sure, in his roundabout, stubborn, secretive way, that this time I would.

“Tyler,” I said, “did he know you were going to do this.”

Tyler almost smiled. It was the first time I’d ever seen him almost smile.

“He told me not to,” he said. “He told me it would insult you.”

“Then why.”

“Because he was wrong about that part.”

I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It came out of me like a hiccup, and then I was crying, standing in the driveway with a cardboard box of my mother’s teapot wallpaper samples at my feet, and Tyler stood there and let me cry and did not try to hug me because he did not know me well enough to hug me.

I gave the check to Marcus.

Not all of it. I kept ten thousand, for the deposit on the duplex and a used car with fewer than a hundred thousand miles on it, which I had not owned in twelve years. I sent fifteen to Dale, in the mail, with a note that said, from the house, and he called me and cried, actually cried, my middle brother who I had not seen cry since our mother’s funeral.

I drove the last fifteen thousand to Marcus’s dealership in a cashier’s check and I put it on his desk.

He looked at it. He looked at me.

“What is this.”

“It’s from the house.”

“Rachel.”

“Tyler gave it to me. I’m giving some of it to you.”

He didn’t touch the check. He looked at it like it might bite him.

“I don’t want his money.”

“It’s not his money. It’s Dad’s money. Dad just routed it funny.”

Marcus’s jaw was working. He looked older than I’d ever seen him look. He was forty-four and his hair was thinning on top and he ran a Ford dealership in a town of eleven thousand people and he had a daughter starting community college in the fall.

“I’m still mad at you,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I’m going to be mad at you for a while.”

“Okay, Marcus.”

He picked up the check. He did not say thank you. He put it in his desk drawer and he closed the drawer and he looked at me and he said, “How’s the new place.”

“It’s small.”

“Yeah.”

“The heater makes a sound.”

“Get somebody to look at that before winter.”

“I will.”

He nodded. He didn’t stand up. I didn’t either. We sat there in his office with the model cars on the shelf behind him and neither of us said anything for a while, and it wasn’t good exactly, but it wasn’t nothing.

I drove back to the duplex in my new used car.

That night I sat on the little concrete slab that passed for a back porch at the duplex, and I thought about the deck my father had built with a fourteen-year-old boy one summer, board by board, and I thought about how a person can spend six years in a house and miss the most important thing that happened in it.

The heater did make a sound. I still hadn’t called anybody about it.

I would.

Not tonight.