My Sister Moved Into Our Dead Mother’s House Before the Funeral, And Changed Every Lock by Sunday

Six months later I flew back to Millersburg for the closing on the house.

Dan met me at the Akron airport. He’d shaved his beard, which he only did when something was making him nervous, and he’d gotten a haircut, which he only did when Mom told him to. Mom had been dead half a year and he was still cutting his hair for her.

“How is she,” I said.

“Working,” Dan said. “A lot. She got a new job in January. Property management company in Wooster. Not accounting. Something different. She said she wanted something different.”

“How’s she doing with Whelan.”

“Whelan surrendered his Ohio license in November. Rachel wasn’t charged. Jim said the prosecutor didn’t want to touch it once the estate was resolved and the family didn’t press. He said, and this is a direct quote, ‘Nobody in this office wants to put a woman in jail for loving her mother badly.'”

I laughed. It came out wrong, more like a cough.

We drove out to the house.

The buyers were a young couple from Cleveland, a nurse and a high school teacher, expecting their first baby in April. They wanted the porch swing to stay. Dan had told them no. Dan had spent three days in November unbolting it from the porch beams and hauling it to his garage in Wadsworth, where it now sat under a tarp waiting for spring so he could refinish it.

The closing was at 2:00 at the title company.

Rachel came in five minutes late. She was in a gray coat I’d never seen before. Her hair was shorter. She looked thinner and also, somehow, steadier, the way people look after they’ve stopped carrying something they’d been carrying for a long time.

She sat down across the table from me. She nodded. I nodded back.

That was the extent of it.

The three of us signed forty-seven pieces of paper. The nurse cried a little when she signed the deed. The teacher put his hand on her back. Dan slid the keys across the table and said, “There’s a good hardware store on Jackson if you need to change the locks.”

I looked at him.

He didn’t look at me. But the corner of his mouth moved, just barely.

After the closing the three of us walked out to the parking lot together. It was one of those February afternoons in Ohio where the sky is the exact color of a nickel and the wind cuts through your coat like it’s personal.

“You want to get coffee,” Dan said.

“I can’t,” Rachel said. “I have a thing at four.”

“Okay.”

“But,” she said. And she stopped. And she looked at me. “Kate. Are you flying out tonight.”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Would you want to. I don’t know. Would you want to come by my apartment for dinner. I’m not a good cook. I could order something.”

I looked at her.

Six months ago I had sat across from her at Mom’s kitchen table and gone through a shoebox of receipts one by one, and we had calculated, together, that the estate owed her $61,940 including the lost wages. And we had paid it, out of the sale of the house, before Dan and I saw a dollar. And she had accepted it without arguing, and she had put most of it directly into her savings account, and she had not, as far as I could tell, spent any of it on herself.

We had exchanged maybe twenty text messages since then. All of them logistical. None of them warm.

“I’d like that,” I said.

“Okay.”

“What time.”

“Seven?”

“Seven.”

She got in her Subaru and drove away.

Dan and I stood in the parking lot.

“You gonna go,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You gonna be okay.”

“I don’t know.”

He put his arm around my shoulders. Dan wasn’t a big hugger. He’d inherited that from Dad. But he stood there with his arm around me for a minute in the parking lot of the title company, and neither of us said anything, and the wind kept blowing, and somewhere across town our sister was driving to whatever her four o’clock thing was in a gray coat neither of us recognized.

“For what it’s worth,” Dan said. “She’s been going to a grief group. On Thursdays.”

“How do you know.”

“She told me. In December. She called me one night and told me. She didn’t ask me to tell you.”

“Then why are you telling me.”

“Because I think she wanted you to know and she didn’t know how to say it.”

I nodded.

That night I drove to Rachel’s apartment. It was on the second floor of a building near the college in Wooster, small, one bedroom, clean in the specific way that Rachel’s spaces had always been clean. She’d ordered Thai food. She’d bought a bottle of wine. She’d set the table for two, with placemats.

On the wall above her couch was a framed photograph I’d never seen before. Mom, in the infusion chair at Cleveland Clinic, with a knitted cap on her bald head, laughing at something off-camera. Rachel must have taken it. Rachel had never shown it to any of us.

I stood in front of it for a long time.

“She was laughing at the nurse,” Rachel said, from the kitchen. “The nurse had told her a dirty joke.”

“Mom loved a dirty joke.”

“I know.”

We sat down and ate. We talked about small things. Rachel’s new job. My apartment in Portland. Dan’s kids. We did not talk about the shoebox or the deed or Bradford Whelan or the locksmith’s van in the driveway. Not because we were pretending it hadn’t happened. Because we both knew it had, and we both knew we were sitting in a room together anyway, and that was the only thing worth talking about, and there was no way to talk about it directly.

At the end of the night she walked me to the door.

“Kate.”

“Yeah.”

She was holding something. A small white envelope.

“This is for you.”

“What is it.”

“Open it in the car.”

I put it in my coat pocket. I hugged her. It was a short hug, a stiff hug, the hug of two people who had not hugged each other in a long time and were out of practice. But it was a hug.

In the rental car I sat in her parking lot with the engine running and opened the envelope.

Inside was Mom’s wedding ring.

And a note, in Rachel’s careful accountant’s handwriting.

“Jim gave this to me to give to you in November. I’ve had it in my dresser for three months. I wanted to hand it to you myself. I’m sorry it took me this long. R.”

I closed the envelope.

I sat there for a while.

Then I put the ring on the chain I wear around my neck, next to the little silver cross Mom had given me for my confirmation in 1993, and I drove back to my hotel through the cold February dark, past the old bank building on Jackson Street where Jim Petrosky’s light was still on upstairs, past the funeral home, past the diner where Mom used to take us for pancakes on Sunday mornings after church.

Mom’s ring was warm against my collarbone by the time I got to the hotel.

Rachel and I are not close, the way we used to be. I don’t know if we ever will be. Some Sundays she calls. Some Sundays she doesn’t. When she does we talk for twenty minutes about nothing in particular and then one of us says we should let the other one go, and we hang up, and I stand in my kitchen in Portland and look out at the rain and think about the shoebox full of gas station receipts.

Dan refinished the porch swing that spring. He hung it on his own back porch in Wadsworth. His kids fight over who gets to sit on it. He sent me a picture in June, both of them squeezed onto it with popsicles, and I forwarded the picture to Rachel without a caption.

She wrote back an hour later.

“Mom would have loved that.”

That was all.

Some Sundays that’s enough.