My Sister Read Mom’s Will Out Loud at Easter Dinner, And My Name Wasn’t On It

Part 4: The Nice Lady

Meg drove down from Marietta the next weekend.

We sat at my kitchen table with the letter between us, and a bottle of wine I’d bought that morning, and she told me what she knew. Which was not everything, but was more than I had.

Ruth had been seventeen. The father had been a boy she wouldn’t name, even at the end. Ruth’s parents, my grandparents, had wanted her to go to a home in Cleveland and give the baby up to strangers. My mother, Ruth’s older sister by nine years, had said absolutely not.

“Your mom drove up to Marietta and had a screaming fight with Grandma in the front yard,” Meg said. “Mom told me about it once. She said your mom stood in the driveway and said, ‘That baby is not going to a stranger. That baby is coming home with me.'”

“When did Ruth tell you?”

“When I was in college. She said she needed one person in the family to know, in case something happened to her before she could tell you herself.” Meg took a sip of her wine. “She always meant to tell you. She was so scared of what it would do to you. And to your mom.”

“Did she love me?”

Meg looked at me for a long time.

“Karen,” she said. “Every card she ever sent me for my birthday, she wrote a check for the same amount and put it in an account for you. Every one. From the year I was born to the year she died. She kept a photo of you in her wallet next to mine. When you got married, she cried for two days because she couldn’t come. Grandpa forbade it. She sat in her kitchen and cried and I sat with her.”

I did not know Ruth was not at my wedding. I had thirty-eight people at my wedding and I had not, at twenty-four, noticed that my aunt was not one of them.

“Yes,” Meg said. “She loved you.”

We drank the wine. We looked at old photos on her phone. Ruth had my chin. She had my hands. I had never noticed.

Then Meg said, “What are you going to do about Diane?”

I had been thinking about that for a week.

The trust from Ruth turned out to be, according to Robert Halloran, just over three hundred thousand dollars. My mother’s estate, once the fraudulent will was set aside and the real one validated, was worth about four hundred thousand. My share was a hundred thousand.

Diane was going to be charged. The DA’s office in the county where the will was filed had contacted Ellen. Priya had told me it was likely a felony and likely a plea, and that Diane would probably not do time but would probably lose her nursing license, which was the thing she had built her whole adult life around.

I could ask the DA not to pursue it.

I thought about that for a long time. I thought about my six-year-old niece with her dinner roll. I thought about Rob, who had not been able to look at me at the table, which meant he had also known, at least a little.

I called Diane.

She answered on the first ring, which told me she had been waiting.

“Karen.”

“Diane.”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

Then she said, “I didn’t know Mom left you a letter.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I thought.” Her voice caught. “I thought if you didn’t get anything you’d just. Go away. Be angry and go away and I wouldn’t have to.”

“Have to what?”

She didn’t answer.

“Diane. Have to what.”

“Look at you,” she said. “Knowing.”

I closed my eyes.

“I’ve known since I was nineteen,” she said. “I’ve known and I’ve had to smile at Christmas and I’ve had to watch Mom love you like.” She stopped. She started again. “Like you were the real one. And I was just. There.”

“Diane.”

“Don’t.”

“Diane, she loved us the same.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. I lived in the same house.”

She was crying now. I could hear it. I had not heard my sister cry since we were teenagers.

“I’m not asking the DA to drop the charges,” I said.

The crying stopped.

“Karen.”

“I’m not going to ask them to press harder, either. But what you did was a crime and I’m not going to make it go away. That’s for you and your lawyer and the court.”

“You could ruin my life.”

“You tried to steal mine.”

She was quiet.

“I want to see the kids,” I said. “I’m not going to punish Emma for what you did. But you and I are not okay. I don’t know when we will be, or if. And I’m not going to lie about that at Thanksgiving. So don’t ask me to.”

“Karen.”

“That’s what I have, Diane. That’s all I have right now.”

She hung up.

I sat on my back porch until it got dark. The cardinal came back. He always comes back.

The DA offered Diane a plea in July. She took it. She lost her nursing license, as Priya had predicted, and she got probation and community service and a felony on her record. Rob paid her legal fees, which I found out from Michael, who called me one Sunday to say he was sorry, he was so sorry, he had believed Diane about the February will and he should have known better, and could I forgive him.

I told him I was working on it.

I did not go to Thanksgiving at Diane’s. I hosted my own, in Columbus, and Michael came with his wife and their two boys, and Meg came, and Meg brought her husband and her grown kids, and my kitchen was full of people who were, one way or another, mine.

Emma was not there. That was the hardest part. Diane would not let her come.

I sent her a Christmas present anyway. A jewelry box. A small one, wooden, with a ballerina inside that actually turned. I don’t know if she got it. Diane never wrote back.

In the spring I drove up to Marietta and I went to see Ruth’s grave. I hadn’t been since her funeral, which I had attended as a niece.

I sat on the grass next to the stone for a while. It was a warm day. There were dandelions.

I told her about the letter. I told her about the trust, and the box, and Diane, and Meg. I told her I was sorry it had taken this long. I told her I understood, or was trying to.

I told her thank you.

On the drive home, I stopped at a diner off the highway and I ordered coffee and a slice of pie I didn’t really want. The waitress was maybe sixty, gray hair pulled back, name tag that said Lorraine.

She refilled my coffee and she looked at me for a second longer than she needed to.

“You okay, honey?”

I thought about it.

“I think so,” I said. “I found out something about my mom. My moms.”

She nodded like this was a completely normal sentence.

“Good ones or bad ones?”

I thought about my mother in her kitchen with the Sanka. *You’re the one who’ll actually read it.*

I thought about Ruth in her kitchen with the checks she couldn’t send.

“Good,” I said. “Both good.”

Lorraine patted my hand once and moved on to the next booth.

I ate the pie after all.