My Sister Sent Me a $12,000 Bill for Our Mother’s Funeral, I Sent Her the Receipts From 1998

Part 4: The Good Coffee

Six months passed.

The TOD went through in February. Rebecca did not contest it. She did not send another invoice. She did not send a Christmas card either, which was the first time in thirty-one years I had not received one.

Aunt Peggy called me in March. She was warm on the phone the way she is always warm and then in the second half of the call her voice got careful in a way I recognized.

“Marie, honey. Rebecca mentioned there was some difficulty about the house.”

“Did she.”

“She said she was heartbroken about it. She said you’d cut her off.”

I sat with the phone in my hand and I thought about what my mother had written. *I know your sister. I know what she will do.*

“Aunt Peggy. I love you. I’m not going to talk to you about Rebecca. If you want to know what happened with Mom’s house you can call Frank Petrosky in Sandusky and he will explain the paperwork to you. That’s the only version I’m giving anybody.”

There was a long pause.

“Well. I just don’t like to see sisters fighting.”

“I know you don’t.”

“Your mother wouldn’t have wanted this.”

That one I sat with for a second. I felt the old pull to explain, to defend, to lay it all out for her the way I’d laid it out for Rebecca on the dining room table.

I didn’t.

“Aunt Peggy, I love you. I have to go.”

I hung up. Aunt Peggy did not call again for four months.

In April I drove down to Cedar Lane for the first time since the funeral. Not to sell it. To decide what to do with it. Ray came with me and we spent three days going through the house room by room.

In the hall closet I found the shoebox.

It was the same shoebox from 1998. Not literally the same, my mother had gone through many shoeboxes over the years, but the same idea. Bills, but also cards. Every card Rebecca and I had ever sent her, back to when we were in grade school. Mother’s Day cards in crayon. Birthday cards with dollar bills we had scotch-taped to the inside as teenagers. A card I sent in 1994 when I got my first bookkeeping job. A card Rebecca sent in 2003 when she made partner.

All of them. Kept.

I sat on the floor of my mother’s hallway and I cried for the first time since she died. Not for the will. Not for Rebecca. For the woman who had saved every card from both her daughters in the same box for fifty years.

Ray found me on the floor and sat down next to me without saying anything. He is good at that.

After a while I said, “I don’t want to sell the house.”

“Okay.”

“I want to keep it. I want to come down here on weekends. I want to fix the porch and plant the tomatoes she used to plant.”

“Okay.”

“Is that stupid.”

“No.”

We drove home the next day.

In May I got an email from David Weller. He wanted to know if I’d be down at the house any weekend soon, because the mailbox had gotten hit again and he’d already fixed it but he wanted to tell me in person. I wrote back that I’d be there Memorial Day weekend. He wrote back that he’d bring banana bread.

I have not seen Rebecca since October.

She sent one email in August. It was three lines long. It said she had been thinking about Mom a lot lately and she was sorry for how things ended and she hoped that someday we could talk. She did not apologize for the will. She did not apologize for the invoice. She did not use the word sorry about anything specific. It was the kind of email you send so you can tell yourself you sent it.

I read it twice and then I archived it.

Not deleted. Archived.

Ray asked me what I was going to do.

“Nothing. Not yet.”

“You going to write her back?”

“When I have something true to say. Not before.”

He nodded and went out to the garage.

I went down to the basement and I got out the plastic tub. I had thought about throwing it away after the settlement went through. I had almost done it in March.

I didn’t.

I carried it back upstairs and I put it in the hall closet next to Ray’s tax paperwork, where it belongs, where it has always belonged.

Then I went into the kitchen. It was almost five. The light was doing the thing it does in October in Toledo, the low gold light through the window over the sink. I put the kettle on. I got down the good coffee, the one my mother had liked, the Gevalia she’d made me buy her at the Kroger because the store brand tasted like dirt.

I made a cup. I sat at my kitchen table.

I did not think about Rebecca.

I thought about my mother at her own kitchen table in 1985, teaching an eleven-year-old girl to save every scrap of paper because someday somebody was going to look her in the face and tell her it didn’t happen.

I thought, *Mom. It happened. I saw it. I have it all.*

I drank the coffee while it was still hot.