My Sister Sold Our Mother’s House Three Days After the Funeral, But She Forgot Who Signed the Deed

Part 4: A Year Later

The house sold in October, three months after the open house.

Not to strangers. To me.

Patricia set it up as a formal buyout. I moved in with Emma the week before Thanksgiving. I kept my mother’s coffee mug on the kitchen counter where it had always been, and I kept the tomato cages in the backyard, and I did not repaint the living room.

I offered Danielle a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. It was not half. It was less than half. Patricia said I had zero legal obligation to offer her anything and I could see her point but I couldn’t live with it.

Danielle did not respond to the offer for six weeks.

Then, in early December, she called me from Chicago.

She said, “I got the paperwork.”

I said, “Okay.”

She said, “A hundred and twenty.”

I said, “Yes.”

There was a long pause.

She said, “Kyle wants me to fight you on it.”

I said, “I know.”

She said, “I told him I’m not going to.”

I didn’t say anything. I was standing at the sink in the kitchen. I could see the backyard through the window. It was snowing, the first real snow of the year.

She said, “I didn’t come home enough.”

I said, “No. You didn’t.”

She said, “I know that’s not the same as. I know it doesn’t fix.”

I said, “It doesn’t.”

Another pause.

She said, “Merry Christmas, Amanda.”

I said, “Merry Christmas.”

She hung up.

She signed the papers in January. She cashed the check. She sent me a text that said thank you and nothing else.

We didn’t talk again for eight months.

Then in August, this past August, a full year and a month after the open house, she called me on a Tuesday afternoon.

She said, “I’m in Belleville.”

I said, “What.”

She said, “I’m at the cemetery. I flew down this morning. It’s Mom’s, um. It’s the fourteenth today. It’s been a year.”

I said, “I know what day it is.”

She said, “Can I come by.”

I stood in my mother’s kitchen, which was now my kitchen, and I looked at the chipped blue mug on the counter, and I thought about all the things I had wanted to say to my sister for a year.

I said, “Yes.”

She came at four. She parked in the driveway. She stood on the porch for a second before she rang the bell, and I watched her through the front window, and I could see her breathing.

I opened the door.

She’d cut her hair. She looked older. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, not the clothes she used to come home in.

She said, “Hi.”

I said, “Hi.”

She said, “Can I come in.”

I said, “That depends. What are you here for.”

Which was a hard thing to say to my sister on the porch of our childhood home. But I said it anyway. Because I had spent a year being the person who didn’t say hard things, and I was done with that.

She said, “I don’t know. I think I just needed to be in the house.”

I stepped back and let her in.

She walked slowly through the living room. She touched the arm of the couch. She went into the kitchen and she stopped when she saw the mug.

She said, “You kept it.”

I said, “Yeah.”

She stood there for a long time. She didn’t pick it up.

She said, “Kyle and I are separated.”

I hadn’t known that.

She said, “It’s been about four months. Since April. He didn’t. He didn’t turn out to be who I thought.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

She said, “Are you.”

I thought about it.

I said, “About Kyle, yes. About you finding out who he is, also yes. That’s it, though.”

She almost smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile. But it was something.

She said, “Can we sit down.”

We sat at the kitchen table. Emma was at cheer practice. It was just us in the house that used to have all four of us in it, back when we were a family and it was easier.

Danielle said, “I’ve been in therapy since May.”

I said, “Okay.”

She said, “I’m not going to ask you to forgive me for anything. That’s not what I’m here for. I don’t want you to say it’s okay because it’s not.”

I said, “Okay.”

She said, “I just wanted you to know that I know.”

That was the closest she got. She didn’t say the whole thing. She didn’t say I know I abandoned you for fourteen months while you nursed our mother and then I tried to sell her house four days after we buried her. She didn’t say I know I called you a liar in front of Rebecca. She didn’t say I know I chose a house in Winnetka over my sister. She said I know. And she left the rest of the sentence for me to fill in, or not.

I sat with it.

Then I said, “You want some coffee.”

She said, “Yes.”

I made coffee. I got out two mugs. I didn’t give her the blue one. I gave her a white one from IKEA. I kept the blue one for myself.

She noticed. She didn’t say anything.

We drank coffee. We talked about Emma’s freshman year. We talked about her divorce lawyer. We didn’t talk about Mom. We didn’t talk about the house. Not directly.

Around five thirty she said she should go. She had a flight the next morning out of Lambert.

She stood in the doorway and she said, “Thank you for letting me in.”

I said, “Yeah.”

She said, “Can I. Would it be okay if I called you sometime.”

I thought about it.

I said, “You can call. I might not always answer.”

She said, “That’s fair.”

She hugged me. It wasn’t a good hug. It was a stiff hug, a first-time-in-a-year hug, the kind of hug you have to relearn.

I hugged her back anyway. Not all the way. But some.

She left.

I closed the door and I stood in the entryway for a minute. Then I went into the kitchen and I picked up the blue mug from the counter and I held it in both hands.

Mom had asked me once, near the end, if I was going to be okay when she was gone.

I’d said yes. I’d said it fast, because I didn’t want her worrying.

Standing in the kitchen holding her mug a year and a month after she died, I understood that she hadn’t been asking about grief. She’d been asking about my sister. She’d known what was going to happen. She’d known Danielle would try, and she’d known I would find out, and she’d known there would be a bad Saturday in July in a house full of strangers and a coral dress and a plate of cookies.

She’d put the house in my name in March so I would win that Saturday.

She hadn’t put it in my name so I could keep it.

She’d put it in my name so I could decide what to do with my sister after.

I set the mug down.

I hadn’t decided yet. Not fully. Whether Danielle got to be in my life again. Whether we ever got back to something that felt like sisters. It was going to take a long time and it wasn’t going to be one phone call and one cup of coffee.

But I’d let her in the door. I’d made her coffee. I’d told her she could call.

Outside, in the yard my mother had mowed until the week she went into hospice, the tomato plants were coming in for the second summer. I’d staked them myself in May.

The blue mug sat on the counter, where it belonged.

I turned off the kitchen light and I went to pick up my daughter from cheer practice.