My Sister Uninvited Me From Our Mother’s Funeral Because I “Made Things Awkward” With the Will

Part 4: Maple Grove

The funeral was at eleven, at St. Mark’s Lutheran, where our mother had been baptized and married and where she had taken us every Sunday until we were old enough to argue about it.

I wore the navy dress Mom had picked out with me two Christmases ago, at the outlet mall in Monroe, when she’d said, “This is a nice funeral dress, honey, you should always have a nice funeral dress,” and I had rolled my eyes at her, and she had bought it for me anyway.

Karen was already at the church when I got there. She was in the vestibule shaking hands with Mrs. Prusinski from three doors down. She saw me over Mrs. Prusinski’s shoulder and her face did something small and tight and then went back to normal.

She walked over.

She hugged me.

For anyone watching, it was a sister hug. For me, it was two women agreeing to hold still for a photograph.

“Thank you for coming,” she said quietly.

“She was my mother too.”

“I know.”

That was all we said.

The service was the service. Pastor Meyer talked about Mom’s laugh, which was accurate, and about her faith, which was more complicated than he made it sound but nobody wanted a complicated eulogy at eleven in the morning. Doug read a Mary Oliver poem. I read the twenty-third psalm because Mom had asked me to, in a note she’d left with Mr. Halbrook, and my voice only broke once, on the part about the still waters.

Karen didn’t read anything. She had said she couldn’t. That was probably true.

At the graveside I stood between her and Doug. Karen’s boys stood on the other side of her, both taller than her now, the older one holding his little brother’s shoulder. When they lowered the casket the younger one made a sound I will remember for the rest of my life.

Karen reached over and took my hand.

I let her.

I don’t know what to tell you about that. I don’t know if I forgave her in that moment or if I just needed something to hold onto. Both things can be true.

Afterward there was a lunch in the church basement. Ham sandwiches. Potato salad. A sheet cake somebody’s cousin had brought. I stood by the coffee urn and talked to Uncle Pete about his knee replacement for twenty minutes because it was easier than talking about anything else.

Karen kept her distance. Not coldly. Just carefully.

When it was almost over, she came and stood next to me at the coffee urn.

“Rachel.”

“Yeah.”

“I saw you with the boys earlier.”

I had spent about half an hour with her sons. The older one, Tyler, was about to start his sophomore year at Bowling Green. The younger one, Cole, was a junior in high school and wanted to be an engineer. I had asked them real questions and listened to real answers and neither of them knew that their grandmother had spent nine years quietly keeping a roof over their heads.

“They’re good kids, Karen.”

“I know.”

“They really are.”

“I know.”

She was looking down at her hands.

“When you and Doug come out to the house next week,” she said, “to go through Mom’s things. I’m not, I’m not going to fight you. About anything. Whatever you and Doug decide. I’ll sign it.”

“Karen.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay.”

She looked up at me.

“I’m not okay, Rach. I want you to know that. I know you probably think I’m, whatever you think I am. But I’m not okay. I haven’t been okay for a long time.”

I looked at my sister, who was fifty-three years old, whose hair had gone gray at the temples in a way I hadn’t noticed until that moment, whose husband had walked out on her nine years ago and who had spent those nine years drowning and lying about it, and I didn’t know what to say to her.

So I said, “I know.”

And I meant it. And I also meant, this is going to take a long time. And I also meant, I am not going to fix this today, and neither are you.

She nodded like she’d heard all of it.

Then she went and stood by her boys.

—

We went to the house on Maple Grove the following Saturday.

Doug and I had drawn up something in the meantime, with Mr. Halbrook’s help. Not a legal deal, not yet. A plan. The house would be sold. Half of the proceeds, plus half of what was in the savings, would come to me and Doug, split evenly. The other half would go into a trust for Tyler and Cole, for education and, when they turned thirty, whatever else they needed. Karen would not be a signatory. Karen would not have access. The trust was in Mom’s name.

Karen would get nothing.

That was the part I still wasn’t sure about, right up until the morning we drove out. Nothing at all felt like a lot. Nothing at all felt like a punishment, even though I had told myself over and over that it wasn’t.

We spread the papers out on the kitchen table. The same kitchen table where Mom had opened the manila folder four years earlier. The pot roast smell was long gone. The house smelled like a house that hadn’t had anyone living in it for a month.

Karen read the papers.

She read them twice.

She picked up the pen.

She signed.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t argue. She didn’t cry. She just signed her name in her big loopy handwriting and slid the papers back across the table to me.

Then she stood up.

“I’m going to go start on Mom’s closet,” she said. “You two can do the kitchen.”

She walked out of the room.

Doug looked at me.

“That was easier than I thought it was going to be.”

“No it wasn’t,” I said.

He thought about it.

“No,” he said. “You’re right. It wasn’t.”

We worked all afternoon. Karen upstairs, us downstairs. Around three she came down with a shoebox and set it on the counter without a word and went back up.

Inside the shoebox were photographs. Old ones. Us as kids. The three of us on the front steps of this house in matching Easter outfits. Karen holding me the day I came home from the hospital, looking at me with a fierce, proprietary love that I could still, forty-eight years later, feel across the kitchen.

I sat on the floor of my mother’s kitchen and looked at that photograph for a long time.

Doug found me there when he came in from loading the car.

“You okay.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

He sat down next to me on the linoleum. Our mother’s linoleum. The linoleum she had scrubbed on her hands and knees every Saturday morning of our entire childhood.

“You think we did the right thing,” I said.

“I think we did the thing Mom asked us to do.”

“That’s not the same.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

Upstairs, we could hear Karen moving around. A drawer opening. A drawer closing. The soft thump of shoes being set down on the hardwood.

I put the photograph back in the shoebox.

I would come back to it later. There would be a lot of things to come back to later. There would be a birthday in November when I would call Karen and she would let it go to voicemail. There would be a Christmas where she came for an hour and left without eating. There would be a Sunday afternoon three years from now, in a diner off I-75, when she would tell me about the debt and the gambling website and the year she had almost lost the apartment, and I would listen without saying anything, and at the end she would say “I’m sorry, Rach,” and I would say “I know,” and I would mean it, and neither of us would know yet what to do with that.

But that Saturday, on the kitchen floor of the house on Maple Grove, I didn’t know any of that yet.

I only knew that our mother was gone, and that my sister was upstairs in our mother’s closet, and that my brother was sitting next to me on the linoleum with his knees pulled up like a boy, and that somewhere in the back of my closet at home there was still a manila folder that nobody outside of the three of us would ever see.

I reached over and took Doug’s hand.

He let me.

Upstairs, a drawer closed.