My Sister Handed Me a Folder at Our Mother’s Funeral, And Told Me Not to Open It Until Everyone Left
Part 1
My sister handed me the folder while our mother’s casket was still above ground.
“Don’t open it until everyone leaves,” Emily said. She didn’t look at me when she said it. She was looking at the cemetery gate, where our brother Doug was already walking back to his rental car, one hand in his suit pocket, the other holding his phone to his ear. Closing a deal, probably. He’d taken two calls during the service.
The folder was manila. Cheap. The kind our mother used to buy at the Kroger on Route 9 when we were kids, three for a dollar. Emily had written my name on the tab in blue pen. Just KATE. No last name, no date, no explanation.
“What is this?”
“Kate. Please.”
She squeezed my wrist and walked off toward Aunt Diane, who was crying into a tissue by the tent. I stood there holding the folder against my chest like it was a baby, and I watched my sister disappear into a small group of women in black coats, and I felt something cold move down the back of my neck that had nothing to do with the October wind.
Our mother had been sick for eleven months. Pancreatic. The kind you don’t beat.
I flew back from Denver three times during those months. Emily lived twenty minutes from Mom in the same town we grew up in, so Emily did most of it. The bathing. The pill schedule. The nights Mom would forget who she was and try to walk out into the yard in her nightgown. Emily did all of it, and she never once, not one time, sent me a Venmo request or a group text asking Doug and me to chip in.
Doug lives in Boston. Doug is a partner at a consulting firm. Doug came home twice.
At the reception at Emily’s house, I put the folder in my purse and I made small talk with our mother’s church friends. I ate a piece of ham. I hugged people who smelled like perfume and casseroles. Doug stood by the fireplace with a beer and told a story about Mom that made everyone laugh, and I watched Emily refill the coffee urn without looking up.
She hadn’t sat down all afternoon.
By six the house was empty except for the three of us and a stack of Tupperware from the neighbors. Doug loosened his tie and said, “So. The will.”
Emily was scraping deviled eggs into the trash.
“Monday,” she said. “The lawyer said Monday, ten a.m.”
“I’ve got a flight Monday night.”
“Then you’ll make your flight.”
Doug looked at me. I looked at the floor. That was how it had always been. Doug loud, Emily quiet, me somewhere in the middle trying not to pick a side.
I went upstairs to the room that used to be Emily’s, where I was sleeping for the weekend, and I sat on the edge of the twin bed with the folder in my lap. It was heavier than it looked. Not thick, but heavy. Like whatever was inside it was made of something denser than paper.
I opened it.
The first page was a photocopy of a bank statement. Our mother’s checking account. The account I knew, because I was a co-signer, the one that had her Social Security going into it. But there was a line item highlighted in yellow. A transfer. Fifteen thousand dollars, three years ago, going OUT to an account I didn’t recognize.
The second page was another statement. Another transfer. Twenty-two thousand this time.
The third page was a whole spreadsheet in Emily’s handwriting. Dates on the left. Amounts in the middle. A running total on the right, going back seven years.
The number at the bottom of the spreadsheet, circled twice, was $186,400.
Underneath the spreadsheet was a plain white envelope. It had my name on it in our mother’s handwriting, the shaky version from the last year, the version that used to embarrass her so badly she wouldn’t sign her own birthday cards.
I opened the envelope with hands that had gone numb.
There was one sheet of yellow legal paper inside, folded once.
The first line said, *Katie, I need you to forgive your sister before you read the rest of this.*
Downstairs, I heard Doug laugh at something on his phone. I heard the refrigerator open. I heard Emily say, quietly, “Doug. Don’t.”
I turned the page over.