My Sister Read Our Mother’s Will Out Loud at Christmas, But She Skipped the Envelope Taped to Page Six

Part 3: In the Car

Preston went out to get it.

I want you to know that Preston, in his stupid vest, walking out into the twenty-two-degree Ohio night without a coat, was the first thing that made me feel sorry for him in eight years. He came back with a leather portfolio and set it on the table in front of Rachel and then he sat down and folded his hands and did not look at her.

“Preston,” Rachel said.

“Open it, Rach.”

She opened it. Inside was a single sheet, notarized, dated October 11th. A codicil to the will. It said what Mom’s letter said it said: the house on Sycamore, in its entirety, to Katherine Marie Dolan. Rachel to receive a specific dollar amount instead, from the retirement account, to equalize the value.

Danny picked it up. Read it twice.

“This is signed. This is notarized. This is real.”

“Yes.”

“And you were going to.”

“I don’t know what I was going to do.”

“You were going to read us the August will and not this.”

“I know what I did, Daniel.”

She had never called him Daniel. Not once in forty-one years. Even Mom hadn’t called him Daniel, only when he was in trouble, and even then only rarely.

I sat down. My knees had stopped working.

“Why,” I said.

Rachel looked at me. Really looked, for maybe the first time that whole visit, maybe longer than that.

“Because you don’t need it.”

That was what she said.

“Because I don’t.”

“Kate. You clean houses.”

“I know what I do.”

“You clean houses and you live behind the Speedway and Mom left you the whole thing and Danny got the Toyota and I got, I got, an amount, an amount of money that is less than the closing costs on the addition we put on the kitchen.”

“So.”

“So I have two kids in orthodontia and Preston’s firm is.”

“Rachel.”

“Preston’s firm is having a year.”

Preston, next to her, closed his eyes.

“And I thought, if I just, if I could just, get through the reading, and put the house in the estate as August wrote it, and then later I could, I could work it out with you both, quietly, we could sell it and split it three ways and it would be.”

“Fair,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You thought that would be fair.”

“I thought it would be fairer than what she did.”

I looked at the letter still on the table. The second and third pages, still folded. The ones addressed to Danny and to me, that Rachel had opened and read and resealed.

I picked up mine.

*Katie,*

*You were the one who came. Every Thursday, and then every day. You brought me the coffee from Sheetz that I’m not supposed to have and you didn’t tell the doctor. You painted my toenails when I couldn’t reach them. You slept on the couch the week I was scared.*

*I know you think I favored Rachel. I know you have thought that since you were nine. It wasn’t favor. It was worry. She was so hard, and you were so soft, and I was so tired.*

*The house is yours because you were the one who kept coming home to it.*

I put the letter down.

I did not cry. I want you to know that. I have cried many times in my life and I will cry many more, but I did not cry then, because I was watching my sister’s face while she watched me read, and I understood that Rachel had already read this letter, alone, in her Lexus in the parking lot of the notary’s office in Columbus, and had driven three hours to my mother’s kitchen with a plan.

“You read this,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You read this and you still.”

“Yes.”

Danny hadn’t opened his yet. He was holding it in both hands, staring at his name on the front in Mom’s handwriting, and I could see him deciding whether he wanted to know what was inside.

He set it down unopened.

“I’ll read mine later.”

“Danny,” Rachel said.

“Not now. Not here.”

He stood up. He picked up his coat from the back of the chair. He looked at me and then at Rachel and then at Preston, and Preston, God bless him, nodded once like a man giving permission for something he had no right to permit.

“Kate. Do you want me to stay.”

I thought about it.

“No. Go home. Call me tomorrow.”

He went. The screen door slapped shut the way it had slapped shut a thousand times in my childhood, and the sound of his truck starting in the driveway was the sound of every Sunday dinner ending for the last twenty years.

Then it was just me and Rachel and Preston, and the pie, uneaten.

“You should go too,” I said.

Preston stood up. Rachel didn’t.

“Kate.”

“Rachel. Go home.”

“Let me.”

“There is nothing you can say to me right now that I want to hear.”

She stayed sitting.

Preston put his hand on the back of her chair, not on her, on the chair, and waited.

She got up. She left the will on the table. She left the codicil. She left the letter Mom had written to her three children, and the letter Mom had written to me, and the letter Mom had written to Danny, still folded, still unopened, sitting next to a plate of pumpkin pie that no one had touched.

At the door she stopped. She did not turn around.

“I know what I did.”

“I know you know.”

“Kate.”

“Rachel. The door.”

She went through it.

Preston, behind her, turned back to me with his hand still on the knob. He wasn’t a bad man. I had spent eight years thinking he was a bad man because he was a bland man, and I had confused those two things.

“She’s been like this since October,” he said. “I didn’t know why.”

“Now you do.”

“Yeah.”

He closed the door behind him.

I sat at the kitchen table alone for a long time. The pie congealed. The Lexus started in the driveway and pulled away and the sound of it faded down Sycamore toward the highway.

I picked up Mom’s letter to me and read it three more times.

Then I picked up the phone and called Danny.

“You home?”

“Just walked in.”

“Open yours.”

There was a pause. I could hear him breathing. I could hear his kitchen, which sounded like my kitchen, which sounded like Mom’s kitchen, because we all bought our appliances at the same Lowe’s in Marion.

“Okay.”

“Call me back after.”

“Okay, Kate.”

He hung up.

I looked at the will on the table. At the tabs Rachel had put there. Pink, yellow, green, and the blue one on page six, the one she hadn’t mentioned, the one that had been there the whole time because she’d put it there herself, because part of her, some part I hadn’t wanted to believe in, had needed us to find it.

That was when I started crying.