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

Part 4: The Rocking Chair

The U-Haul showed up on Friday, not Saturday. Rachel didn’t come with it. She sent Brian and a man I didn’t know, and they unloaded everything into my garage without saying much. Brian handed me an envelope on his way out.

Inside was a cashier’s check for seventy-four thousand dollars, drawn on Rachel and Brian’s home equity line of credit. There was no note.

I called Denise Halloran on Monday morning and told her what had happened.

Denise is fifty-eight, gray hair in a bun, her mother’s same warm eyes. She listened without interrupting for almost twenty minutes.

When I was done she said, “Katharine. You have every right to press charges. What she did is a felony. Multiple felonies, actually. You would win.”

“I know.”

“But you’re not going to.”

“No.”

She nodded once, like she’d expected that. “Can I ask why.”

I thought about it.

“Because my mother would have hated it,” I said. “My mother would have said, you have the money and you have the china and you have your father’s tools, what more do you want, Katie.”

“That’s a generous answer.”

“It’s not generous. I want more. I want Rachel to feel this the way I feel it. But if I press charges, I don’t get that. I get a court date and a plea deal and a sister I never speak to again, and I lose Ethan too because Ethan can’t take sides, Ethan’s not built for it. And I get to be the woman in Marion who sent her sister to prison over a house.”

Denise was quiet.

“You could still sue civilly,” she said. “For the emotional distress. For the fraud. You’d get a judgment.”

“I already got what I asked for.”

“Katharine. You asked for less than you’re owed. She profited from an executor fee she didn’t earn honestly, and the estate expenses were probably inflated, and I’d bet money she took cash out of your mother’s checking before she probated it. If we opened the books . . .”

“Denise,” I said. “I know.”

She looked at me over her reading glasses.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s your call. But I’m going to send you a letter this week outlining your options in writing, and I want you to keep it in a drawer somewhere. If Rachel ever tries anything with you again, ever, you pull that letter out and you call me. Deal?”

“Deal.”

I drove home. I unloaded the U-Haul boxes one at a time.

The cedar chest went at the foot of my bed. The rocking chair went by the window in my living room, where the light comes in in the afternoon. The china I put in the hutch that had been my grandmother’s, which had come to me when Mom moved to the smaller house in 2004, and which had been sitting mostly empty ever since.

The photographs took me three days. There were thirty-one boxes. I sat on my living room floor and I opened them one by one, and I found pictures I hadn’t seen in twenty years. Dad holding me on his shoulders at the Marion County Fair in 1988. Mom and Rachel and me on the front porch on Vernon Avenue, all three of us in matching Easter dresses Mom had sewn herself. Ethan as a baby, asleep on the rug.

I found one picture I kept coming back to. It was Rachel and me, maybe nine and eleven, sitting on the front steps of the Vernon Avenue house eating popsicles. Rachel had a red one and I had a purple one. She was leaning against me and I had my arm around her shoulders and she was laughing at something, mouth wide open, red popsicle everywhere.

I sat on my floor and I looked at that picture for a long time.

I did not call my sister.

I did not put the picture away either. I put it on my refrigerator, under a magnet, next to the phone number for my dentist.

Ethan came over the following weekend. He brought a bottle of wine and a lasagna his wife had made. He stood on my porch and he didn’t come in until I said his name.

“Kat,” he said. He looked terrible. “I told Rachel to take the loan payoff back. She won’t. She said it’s between me and her now, not you.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to pay you back anyway. Half of it. It’s yours. I’ve been thinking about it and it’s yours.”

“Ethan.”

“Twenty thousand five hundred. It’ll take me a few years but I’ll do it. I want to do it.”

I looked at my brother standing on my porch in his green Carhartt jacket, and I thought about how he had cried at Mom’s funeral, and how he had told me the truth about the loans on the very first phone call even though he didn’t have to, and how he had shown up at the storage unit at 8:47 in the morning when I’d asked him to.

“Ethan,” I said. “Come inside. It’s cold.”

He came inside. We ate the lasagna. We didn’t talk about Rachel.

Before he left, he stood in my living room and he saw the rocking chair by the window. He walked over to it and he ran his hand along the arm.

“Mom used to rock me in this,” he said.

“She rocked all three of us in that.”

He sat down in it. He was too big for it now, his knees stuck up funny, but he rocked back and forth a few times and he closed his eyes.

“Kat,” he said, eyes still closed. “Are you ever going to talk to her again.”

I thought about the question.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not this year.”

“But maybe.”

“Maybe. I don’t know, Ethan. I don’t want to lie to you. I don’t know if I can.”

He nodded. He kept rocking.

“That’s fair,” he said.

He left around nine. I stood at my front door and watched his headlights back down the driveway, and then I closed the door and I locked it.

I went into the kitchen. The check from Rachel, the original twelve thousand dollar check with the misspelled name, was still on my counter where I’d left it four weeks ago. I’d never cashed it. Denise had told me not to, in case I ever needed it as evidence, and then later I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

I picked it up. I looked at Rachel’s handwriting. *Katharine* with two A’s.

I opened the drawer where I keep the scissors and I cut the check in half. Then in quarters. Then I dropped the pieces in the trash.

The seventy-four thousand from Brian’s home equity line was already in my savings account. I hadn’t touched it. I didn’t know yet what I was going to do with it. Maybe I’d put a new roof on the house. Maybe I’d take a trip somewhere. Maybe I’d just let it sit.

I went into the living room and I turned off the lamp and I sat down in my mother’s rocking chair in the dark.

Outside, the wind was doing that mean March thing again across the front yard. I could hear it against the windows.

I rocked, slowly, the way Mom used to rock. The chair made the same small creak it had always made, the one Dad had never gotten around to fixing.

On the refrigerator, under the magnet, Rachel was nine years old and laughing with a red popsicle. I couldn’t see the picture from where I was sitting. But I knew it was there.

I rocked for a long time.