My Sister Sold Our Dead Mother’s House Behind My Back, Then Mailed Me a Check for $12,000

Part 2: The Yellow Wallpaper

I don’t remember hanging up on Ethan. I remember standing at the kitchen sink afterward, running cold water over my wrists, which is something my mother used to do when she got bad news. She said it was better than crying. I don’t know if it was better. My face was wet anyway.

Forty-one thousand dollars to Ethan. Twelve thousand dollars to me. That left, out of Rachel’s math, somewhere around a hundred and thirty thousand unaccounted for.

I called my friend Marcy, who is a paralegal at a firm in Bucyrus. Marcy is not a lawyer and she was very clear about that, but Marcy has been my friend since seventh grade and I trust her more than I trust most doctors.

“Send me a picture of the check,” she said. “And the note. And take a screenshot of the Zillow listing before it disappears.”

I did all three.

Ten minutes later she called back.

“Kat,” she said. “Was your mom’s house in a trust or was it in her name.”

“Her name. Just her name. Dad’s been dead since 2011.”

“Okay. And you were named in her will.”

“Half and half. Me and Rachel, half and half. Ethan wasn’t in it because Mom already gave him the down payment on his condo in 2019, and she said that was his share.”

Marcy was quiet.

“Kat,” she said. “For Rachel to sell that house, she needed your signature. Either on a deed transfer or on the probate paperwork acknowledging the sale. Executor doesn’t just get to move real estate on their own without the heirs signing off, not in Ohio, not on a house that goes half to a non-executor heir under the will. Somebody signed for you.”

I sat down on my kitchen floor.

“Marcy.”

“I know.”

“Somebody signed my name.”

“I know, honey. Don’t call her yet. Don’t cash that check. Don’t do anything. I’m going to give you the name of an actual attorney tomorrow, a woman named Denise Halloran in Marion, she does probate, and you’re going to go see her.”

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay in bed and I thought about Rachel at the funeral. Rachel had done the eulogy. She’d stood at the front of Snyder-Rodman Funeral Home in her navy blue dress and she’d talked about how Mom had raised three kids alone after Dad’s heart attack, how Mom had worked two jobs at the hospital laundry and never once complained, how Mom had taught us that family was the only thing that mattered.

Rachel had cried when she said that. I had watched her from the front pew and I had thought, my sister is a better person than I am.

The next morning I drove to the house.

I don’t know why. Denise Halloran wouldn’t see me until Thursday and it was Tuesday and I couldn’t sit in my kitchen anymore. I drove the eleven minutes to Vernon Avenue and I parked across the street and I looked at it.

There was a new mailbox. Black. The old one had been white with a cardinal painted on the side, my dad had painted the cardinal in 1998 and it had faded but you could still see it. Now there was a black mailbox with a house number decal.

A woman came out the front door with a golden retriever on a leash. She was maybe forty. She saw me sitting in my car and she waved, friendly, the way people wave in Marion when they see a stranger on their street.

I got out.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry, this is going to sound strange. I grew up in that house. My mother lived there until November. Would you mind if I asked when you closed?”

Her face changed. Not to anything mean. To something gentler.

“February,” she said. “We closed February 14. Her daughter said she’d passed in the fall. I’m so sorry.”

“Her daughter,” I said. “Did you meet her daughter.”

“Rachel. Yes. She was at the closing. She was so lovely about the whole thing. She said she and her sister had grown up here but her sister lived in Colorado now and couldn’t get back for the sale, so she was handling everything by phone.”

Colorado.

I have never lived in Colorado. I live eleven minutes from that house. I have lived in Marion my entire life except for four years at Ohio State.

“Did she sign anything,” I asked. “At the closing. For her sister.”

“She had power of attorney,” the woman said. “I remember because our lawyer commented on it. She had the paperwork all ready.”

I said thank you. I got back in my car. I drove three blocks and then I pulled over because I couldn’t see the road anymore.

Rachel had a power of attorney with my name on it. Rachel had signed my name at a closing and told a stranger I lived in Colorado. Rachel had walked out of that closing with a hundred and eighty six thousand dollars and she had paid off our brother to keep his mouth shut and she had waited nine weeks to mail me a check for twelve thousand and a note telling me not to call.

I drove home. I sat at my table. I picked up the phone.

This time when I called Rachel, she answered.

“Kat,” she said, and her voice was already tired, the voice she uses when she thinks I’m about to make something into a bigger deal than it needs to be. “Kat, I told you not tonight. I’m slammed at work.”

“I met the woman who bought Mom’s house.”

The line went silent.

“Rachel,” I said. “I met her. She told me you had power of attorney. She told me I live in Colorado.”

“Kat.”

“When did I sign a power of attorney, Rachel.”

She said my name again. Just my name. And then she said, “You did sign it. You just don’t remember. It was at the hospital. The last week, when Mom was in and out. You signed a lot of things that week.”

I remembered that week. I remembered signing the DNR paperwork with Rachel in the hallway outside Mom’s room at OhioHealth. I remembered Rachel handing me a stack of forms and saying *these are for the funeral home, these are for the insurance, sign here and here and here,* and I remembered signing them because my mother was dying six feet away and I would have signed anything Rachel put in front of me.

“Rachel,” I said. My voice was very quiet. “What else did I sign that week.”

She didn’t answer.

“Rachel.”

“I have to go, Kat.”

“Rachel, what else.”

She hung up.

I sat there holding the phone.

Then I called Ethan.

“I need you to do something for me,” I said. “I need you to come to Mom’s storage unit with me on Saturday. The one on Marion-Mount Gilead Road. Rachel has the key but I have the code. And I need to see what’s still in there before she moves it.”

Ethan was quiet a long time.

“Kat,” he finally said. “I’ll pay you back. The forty-one thousand. I’ll pay you back, I swear, I just need time, I didn’t know she was going to do this to you, I thought she was going to give you your half, I thought . . .”

“Ethan,” I said. “I don’t want the money. I want you at that storage unit on Saturday at nine a.m. Are you going to be there or not.”

“I’ll be there.”

I hung up.

Then I went and got my mother’s old address book out of the drawer where I’d put it after the funeral. I flipped to the H’s. My mother had been friends since 1987 with a woman named Judy Halloran, who used to bring us tomatoes from her garden every August.

Denise Halloran, the probate attorney Marcy had recommended, was Judy Halloran’s daughter.

Marion, Ohio, is a small town.

I put the address book down and I looked out the window at the sun going down over my neighbor’s roof, and for the first time since I’d opened that envelope, I felt something other than sick.