My Sister Read Our Mother’s Will Out Loud at Christmas, But She Skipped the Envelope Taped to Page Six
Part 4: The Spring
Danny called back twenty minutes later.
He didn’t tell me what was in his letter. Not that night. He told me a year later, on the porch of the Sycamore house, after we’d finished painting the trim, and even then he only told me a piece of it. That was all right. It was his.
What I can tell you is what happened next.
Rachel did not call for eleven weeks. I did not call her either. We were, both of us, waiting for the other one to figure out how to be a person again, and neither of us knew how.
Danny called me on a Tuesday in March.
“She called me.”
“Okay.”
“She wants to come up.”
“Okay.”
“Kate. I don’t know what to tell her.”
I was standing in the kitchen of a woman named Deborah whose husband had died in November and whose bathroom I had been cleaning every other Wednesday for six years. Deborah was upstairs. I was scrubbing her kitchen sink with a green sponge and thinking about the way my mother used to hum when she scrubbed sinks, a specific song she never named, and I said to my brother, “Tell her she can come. But she can’t come to my house.”
“Where.”
“Tell her to meet me at Mom’s.”
He told her. She came up on a Saturday. It was the last week of March and there was still snow in the shady parts of the yard but the crocuses were up along the front walk, the ones Mom had planted the year I got married and left along the walk the year I got divorced.
I got to the house first. I sat on the porch steps in a coat I’d owned since 2011.
The Lexus pulled up. Just her, no Preston, no kids. She sat in the car for a minute with the engine off before she got out.
She walked up the walk and stopped at the bottom of the steps.
I did not stand up.
“Kate.”
“Rachel.”
She had brought something. A shoebox. She held it in front of her with both hands, the way you’d hold a casserole dish at a viewing.
“Can I sit.”
“Sit.”
She sat next to me on the step. Not touching. A person’s width apart.
“I brought.”
“I see.”
She didn’t open it right away. We sat there for a while with the shoebox between us and watched a squirrel do something aggressive to a bird feeder across the street.
“I’ve been in therapy,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Since January.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not saying that so you’ll.”
“I know why you’re saying it.”
“Yeah.”
More silence. The squirrel gave up and left. A truck went by on Sycamore and the driver waved because that’s what people do here and Rachel lifted her hand automatically and waved back and then let her hand fall into her lap like it had betrayed her.
“You want to know what’s in the box,” she said.
“Only if you want to show me.”
She opened it.
Inside were letters. Maybe thirty of them. All in Mom’s handwriting, all on the goldfinch stationery, all addressed to Rachel, all with dates going back to 1998.
“She wrote me,” Rachel said. “For twenty-six years. Two, three times a year. When I moved to Columbus. When I got married. When the boys were born. When Preston’s dad died. Every time something happened, she wrote me a letter.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I.”
“What?”
“I didn’t read them. Kate, I didn’t read them. I saw the handwriting on the envelope and I put them in this box and I told myself I’d get to them and I never did. Not one. Not once.”
She was not crying. She was talking in a flat voice like she was reading a deposition, and I understood that this was the only way she could get the sentences out.
“I found the box when I was cleaning out my closet in February. Preston made me. He said I couldn’t keep, he said the boys were noticing. That I wasn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“I read them. All of them. In one night. I sat on the floor of the closet and read twenty-six years of my mother writing to me and I.”
She stopped.
I looked at the box. I did not reach for it. It was not mine.
“She wasn’t mad at me,” Rachel said. “In any of them. She wasn’t. She was, she was proud of me. She kept telling me she was proud of me. And I.”
“Rachel.”
“I thought she loved you more.”
“I know.”
“I have thought that my entire life.”
“I know.”
“And in December I sat at your kitchen table and I.”
“I was there.”
She let out a laugh that wasn’t a laugh.
“Yeah. You were.”
We sat.
I’ll tell you the truth: I did not forgive her that day. I want to say I did, I want to tell you that we hugged on the steps of our mother’s house and the crocuses bloomed and the neighbor came over with a casserole, but that’s not what happened. What happened is she showed me the box and I said thank you for showing me and she said can I come inside and I said no. Not today. And she nodded and she got in the Lexus and she drove back to Columbus.
She called two weeks later. I let it go to voicemail. She called two weeks after that and I picked up and we talked about her older boy’s baseball for eleven minutes and hung up.
That was May.
In June she drove up again and I let her in the house. We sat in Mom’s kitchen and drank coffee that I made in Mom’s coffee maker and did not talk about the will.
In July she drove up with the boys and we grilled hot dogs in the backyard and Danny came over and my nephew asked me why there was no dad here and Danny said because sometimes there just isn’t, buddy, and my nephew said okay and asked for more ketchup.
In August, a year after Mom signed the will, Rachel and I stood in the driveway of the Sycamore house together and looked at the aluminum siding and Rachel said, “It really is the color of a Band-Aid.”
“I know.”
“I always hated it.”
“Me too.”
“Are you going to sell it.”
I thought about that for a long time before I answered.
“No.”
“You’re going to live in it.”
“I already moved in. Two weeks ago. I gave up the duplex.”
She nodded. Her eyes did a thing. She looked away, at the crocus bed, which had nothing in it in August but which I knew, and she knew, would come back.
“Good,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s what she wanted.”
“Yeah.”
She got in the Lexus. She rolled the window down.
“Kate.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to keep coming up. If that’s.”
“Come up.”
She came up. Not every month, but often. Sometimes with Preston, more often without. Danny started coming over on Sundays with a knee brace for me because I’d started limping from all the kneeling I did at work, and he’d adjust it while we watched the Browns lose and eat the frozen casserole from the neighbor across the street, which I kept, because I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out.
The letter Mom wrote to Danny, I still don’t know what’s in it. He’s told me a piece. There’s more, I think. He’ll tell me when he wants to. Or he won’t. Either is all right.
The letter Mom wrote to me, I keep in the drawer of the nightstand in what used to be her bedroom and is now mine. Sometimes I take it out and read the line about her being tired. Sometimes I don’t.
The shoebox of letters, Rachel keeps in her closet in Columbus. She told me once that she reads one every Sunday night, in order, and when she finishes them all she starts over.
The house is still the color of a Band-Aid. I haven’t painted it. I don’t know if I will.
Last week, on the first cold night of November, Rachel called me from her kitchen. She’d made a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and it hadn’t set right, and she wanted to know what Mom used to do.
I told her.
She said thank you. She said, “Kate. Can I ask you something.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think she knew.”
“Knew what.”
“That I would do what I did. In December. Do you think that’s why she wrote the letter to all three of us. Because she knew.”
I thought about the blue tab on page six. I thought about my mother, in a lawyer’s office in October, telling him to add a codicil and asking for the goldfinch stationery from her purse.
“Yeah, Rach. I think she knew.”
There was a long quiet on the line. Then my sister, on the other end, in a house I have still never been inside, said:
“I miss her.”
“I know.”
“Every day.”
“I know.”
We hung up.
Outside, on Sycamore, a truck went past and the driver waved into the empty porch, because that’s what people do here, and I waved back through the window even though he couldn’t see me.
The pie in the kitchen was setting. I’d made it early. I didn’t know why.
Then I did.