My Sister Sold Our Dying Mother’s House Behind My Back, And Left a Cashier’s Check on My Porch

Part 3: What We Didn’t Say

Rachel’s face went very still.

“You knew.”

“I knew she was planning something with the house. I didn’t know the details. She called me one night in May, when you were at that conference in Cleveland. She asked me a hypothetical question about hospice at home versus at a family member’s house. She was, you know how she gets, she was pretending it was for a friend from church. But I knew.”

“You never said anything.”

“Neither did you.”

We looked at each other across the kitchen table.

I said, “I think she asked us both. Separately. And I think she made us both promise not to tell the other one, because she knew if we talked about it we’d talk her out of it.”

Rachel let out a sound that was almost a laugh. “Of course she did.”

“She played us.”

“She’s been playing us since we were four and six.”

I picked up the check again. Set it down again.

“I don’t want the money,” I said.

“You have to take it. She was very specific.”

“Rachel.”

“She wrote a whole paragraph about Danny’s school district that I didn’t put in the letter because I didn’t want to embarrass you. She wanted this. Take the money, Kate.”

I folded the check in half and put it in my pocket. Not because I had accepted it. Because I couldn’t look at it anymore.

We sat there for a while.

“The couple on the porch,” I said. “With the baby.”

“The Hendersons. He’s a teacher. She works for the county. They offered above asking because they fell in love with the peach tree.”

“That’s good.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Rachel got up and made tea neither of us drank. She put the mug in front of me and sat back down and neither of us said anything for a long time.

Finally she said, “I was going to give you the check at the funeral.”

“Jesus, Rachel.”

“I know. I know. That’s why I couldn’t do it. I sat in my car outside your house for an hour tonight and I couldn’t make myself knock, and I couldn’t make myself drive away, so I just left it on the porch like a coward. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not a coward.”

“I sold our mother’s house and left you a check on your welcome mat, Kate.”

“You did what she asked you to do.”

“That doesn’t make it not cowardly.”

I reached across the table and took her hand. She let me. Her fingers were cold from holding the tea mug.

“You’ve been carrying this since April,” I said.

“Yes.”

“By yourself.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to be angry about that. Not tonight. But later. I want you to know that.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to be angry that you let me keep calling you about my schedule and Danny’s custody stuff while you were, while you were doing all of this by yourself. I’m going to be angry that you didn’t let me help.”

“Okay.”

“But not tonight.”

“Okay.”

She didn’t apologize. That was the thing that told me she meant it. Rachel apologizes for everything, for the weather, for other people’s rudeness, for existing in a room. She didn’t apologize for this. She just held my hand and let me be angry about it in advance.

—

Mom lived nine more days.

She woke up the next morning and ate half a piece of toast and asked for her reading glasses. She was lucid for most of a Wednesday and she told me the story of how Dad proposed, which I had heard a hundred times, and I let her tell it again like it was the first time. She held Danny’s hand on Friday afternoon and told him he was going to be tall like his grandfather. She didn’t call me Deborah again.

On the last morning, Rachel and I were both there. The hospice nurse had told us the night before. We took shifts on the little chair next to the bed and we didn’t sleep and we drank a lot of bad coffee and at some point around dawn Rachel got into the bed with her, on top of the quilt, and put her head on Mom’s shoulder the way she used to when she was small and had a bad dream.

Mom’s hand found mine. She squeezed once. Then she let go.

The room got very quiet.

The baby monitor was still on. I could hear the small sounds of the house. The refrigerator. A bird outside the window. The furnace clicking on.

Rachel didn’t move for a long time.

—

I did not take the check to the bank for six weeks.

It sat on my kitchen counter, next to the coffee maker, where I saw it every morning. Danny asked me once what it was and I told him it was from Grandma, and he said, “Oh,” in that way twelve-year-olds have of accepting weird adult answers, and he never asked again.

I finally deposited it on a Tuesday in October.

I paid off the divorce lawyer. I paid off the credit card I’d been carrying since the year Danny was born. I put the rest in an account for his college, in a fund Rachel helped me pick because Rachel is better at that kind of thing than I am and always has been.

I did not enroll Danny in a new school district. I couldn’t bring myself to move out of the house he’d grown up in. I hope Mom would understand. I think she would.

—

Rachel and I are not the same as we were.

There is a thing between us now, a small hard thing, made of the months when she carried it alone and the months when I let her. We haven’t talked about it. I said I was going to be angry later, and later has been arriving in pieces, in little moments, a snap over the phone about Thanksgiving plans, a long silence after she asked if I wanted to split Mom’s china. We are working it out slowly. It is not fixed.

Last week she called me on a Sunday afternoon. She said she’d driven past the house on Poplar Street. She said the Hendersons had painted the front door blue, which Mom would have hated, and put a little wooden sign in the yard with the baby’s name on it, and there were pumpkins on the porch already even though it was only the first week of October.

“How did you feel,” I asked.

She was quiet.

“I felt like I wanted to knock on the door and tell them about the peach tree,” she said. “How Dad planted it. How Mom used to make preserves every August. I wanted them to know.”

“Did you knock?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not my house anymore. It’s their house. And the tree is still there whether they know the story or not.”

I didn’t answer for a second.

Then I said, “I have two jars left. Of the preserves.”

“Save one for me.”

“I will.”

We hung up.

I went to the pantry and I took down the two jars from the shelf where I’d been keeping them, behind the flour, where I wouldn’t see them by accident and cry in front of Danny. I put one on the counter for Rachel. I put the other back on the shelf.

I stood in the pantry for a minute with the light off.

Then I closed the door and went to make dinner, because Danny had a soccer game at six, and my sister was coming over on Sunday, and there was a small hard thing between us that we were still learning how to hold.