My Sister Cashed Mom’s Life Insurance Check Before the Funeral, And Left Me a Voicemail About It

Part 4: The Sunroom

She told me on the porch. Some of it. Not all of it.

She said Doug had a business idea, a franchise thing, and he needed a partner, and Mom had said no, and Rachel had panicked because she’d already told Doug she could get the money. She said she’d only meant to borrow against the policy. She said she’d meant to pay it back after the franchise took off.

She said she hadn’t meant for Mom to die.

That was the sentence that broke something in me.

“Mom had congestive heart failure since 2020, Rachel.”

“I know.”

“You knew the timeline. Everyone knew the timeline.”

“I know, Katie.”

“So don’t sit here and tell me you didn’t mean for her to die. You meant for her to die and for the check to already be in your account when she did.”

Rachel didn’t answer.

I sat down on the porch step then, not next to her, but on the other end, three feet of painted wood between us.

“Whose signature is on the form.”

Long silence.

“Mine.”

“And the driver’s license.”

“Doug knew a guy.”

“Doug knew a guy.”

“Katie, please.”

I looked out at Aunt Marlene’s yard. The bird feeder Mom had helped her put up two summers ago. The little concrete rabbit by the flower bed.

“The sheriff has the paperwork,” I said. “It’s already in motion. I can’t stop it now even if I wanted to.”

“Do you want to.”

I thought about that for a long time.

“No,” I said.

She started to cry again. Not the theatrical crying from the funeral. Something quieter. Something that sounded like it had been waiting a long time.

“You were her favorite,” Rachel said. “You know that, right? You in Denver with your good job and your calm life. Sunday phone calls. Everything neat. I was the one who stayed. I was the one who took her to the cataract surgery and the cardiologist and drove her to Meijer every Thursday because she wouldn’t order groceries online. And she still. She still.”

She stopped.

“She still what.”

“She still wouldn’t help me.”

I looked at my sister and I did not feel what I thought I would feel. I did not feel triumphant. I did not feel vindicated.

I felt tired, and I felt sad, and I felt a small mean thing underneath it all that I recognized as satisfaction, and I hated myself for that last part.

“Rachel,” I said. “She said no because Doug was a bad idea. Not because she loved you less.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. Because she told Aunt Marlene. She was ashamed. Not of you. For you.”

Rachel put her face back in her hands.

I did not touch her.

That was the hardest part. I wanted to. My whole body wanted to. Thirty-eight years of being her sister was in my hands and it wanted to reach out and put itself on her shoulder.

I kept them in my lap.

“You should go home,” I said.

“Katie.”

“You should go home, Rachel.”

She stood up. She wiped her face on the sleeve of the navy dress. She walked down the porch steps to the Subaru, not the SUV, I noticed. She’d driven the Subaru.

She turned around at the car door.

“Are we done.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. There isn’t a word for what we were.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

She got in the car and drove away.

The investigation took four months. Doug was charged with forgery and identity theft. Rachel was charged with wire fraud and conspiracy. She pleaded down to a lesser charge, five years probation and full restitution. The SUV got repossessed in November. Northwestern Mutual reissued the policy payout, my half went into an account in my name in December, three days before Christmas, which felt like a joke someone was playing on me.

I didn’t touch it for a long time.

I flew back to Traverse City twice that fall to meet with the estate attorney about the house. Rachel and I communicated through him. We split the house sale down the middle, per Mom’s will, which had never been altered. The ceramic rooster went to Aunt Marlene.

I saw Rachel once during those trips, at the attorney’s office, sitting across a conference table. She’d lost weight. Her hair was different, shorter, the color grown out. She didn’t say hello. Neither did I. We signed our names on the papers the attorney slid across the table and we did not look at each other.

That was in October.

In February, she sent me a letter. A real one, on paper, in Mom’s handwriting almost, that same careful cursive we’d both learned from her. Two pages. She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t defend herself. She said she was in a program. She said she’d left Doug in December. She said she thought about Mom every day and about me almost as often and that she wasn’t writing for forgiveness because she knew that wasn’t mine to give on a schedule.

She said she’d understand if I never wrote back.

I put the letter in the drawer in Denver, next to the note from my lunchbox.

I didn’t write back. Not that spring. Not that summer.

In August, almost a year after Mom died, I flew back to Traverse City for what would have been her seventy-fifth birthday. Aunt Marlene had asked me to come. She wanted to plant a serviceberry in Mom’s honor at the little park by the bay where Mom used to walk.

Rachel was there.

Marlene hadn’t warned me. I think she knew if she had, one of us wouldn’t have come.

Rachel was standing by the hole in the ground with a shovel, in jeans and a t-shirt, sunburned across the nose. When she saw me she went very still, the way an animal goes still when it doesn’t know if it’s going to be hit.

I walked over.

I didn’t hug her. I wasn’t ready for that. I might never be ready for that.

I took the shovel out of her hands and dug for a while and then I handed it back and she dug for a while.

We planted the tree together without talking.

When it was in the ground, Aunt Marlene said a few words, and cried, and I cried, and Rachel cried, and we all stood there in the August sun looking at a skinny little tree that would take twenty years to look like anything.

Afterward Rachel walked with me to my rental car.

“Katie,” she said.

“Don’t.”

“Okay.”

She stopped at the curb.

I opened the car door. Then I stopped. I stood there with my hand on the top of the door and I looked at her across the roof of a Hyundai in a public park in Traverse City, Michigan.

“I got your letter,” I said. “In February.”

“I know. I mean, I figured, when you didn’t write back.”

“I’m not writing back yet.”

“Okay.”

“I might.”

She nodded. She was trying very hard not to cry again and mostly failing.

“Rachel.”

“Yeah.”

I wanted to tell her I loved her. I wanted to tell her I hated her. I wanted to tell her that some nights I still dreamed about her handing me that folded paper in Mom’s bedroom, and some nights I dreamed about her at seven years old, teaching me to ride a bike in the church parking lot, and I could not reconcile those two people and I had stopped trying.

I said none of that.

I said, “The rooster is at Aunt Marlene’s. If you want to see it.”

She looked at me.

“Okay,” she said.

I got in the car.

I drove back to Marlene’s, and I sat on her porch in the evening, and I watched the mourning doves come down to the feeder the way they used to come down to Mom’s, and I thought about a skinny tree in a park by the bay, and I thought about how a person could plant something with someone and still not know if they were ever going to sit under its shade together.

I thought I probably wouldn’t write Rachel back that year.

But I thought, maybe, the year after.

And I let that be enough for one night.