The journal sat closed on the kitchen table between us, and I\u2019d already gone and set my coffee mug down too close, so there was a ring soaking into the cover before either of us said anything.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
Karen had driven three hours to be here. We hadn\u2019t spoken since we buried Mom in March, not a real word, and now here we were, two grown women in our sixties acting like we were back in the bedroom we\u00a0used<\/span>\u00a0to share, still keeping score.<\/p>\nI\u2019ll be honest with you. I made the coffee just to have something to do with my hands.<\/p>\n
Mom left me the house. Three hundred and ten thousand dollars, give or take, that\u2019s what the realtor figured. Karen got the savings, which came to twenty-two thousand and some change. You can imagine how that went over. Karen has said to my face, more than once,\u00a0\u201cMom loved me more, she just felt guilty about you.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0And I\u2019d say back, calm as anything,\u00a0\u201cMom didn\u2019t love you more, Karen. She trusted me more.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0That word, trusted, I held onto it like a life raft. The house wasn\u2019t about love. It was about who Mom believed could handle the truth of things. That\u2019s what I told myself anyway.<\/p>\nHere\u2019s the thing about my sister and me. We were never alike, not even as kids. Karen was the easy one. Soft voice, always agreed, never made a fuss at the dinner table. Mom\u00a0used<\/span>\u00a0to call her\u00a0\u201cmy little sunshine.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Me, I was the one who argued, who\u2019d tell Mom her contractor was robbing her blind and her roof guy was a crook and she needed to stop letting people walk on her. We fought all the time, Mom and me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Over money, over her doctors, over whether she should even still be driving. I drove her crazy. I knew it then and I know it now.<\/p>\n
And our dad, well, that\u2019s a whole other thing. Dad left when I was eleven and Karen was nine. The story we always got, the story Mom told the relatives, was that it was the drinking. He drank, it got bad, he left, end of story. I grew up believing that. Mind you, I barely remembered him. A big quiet man who smelled like cigarettes and pine soap. People in town always said Karen had his eyes. Nobody ever said I looked like anybody.<\/p>\n
\n
\n
So that morning at the table, I finally said it.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s only one way to settle this.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0I put my hand flat on the journal.\u00a0\u201cSix years she wrote in this thing. Let\u2019s just read what she actually thought.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Karen made a face but she didn\u2019t say no. She came around to my side of the table and stood over my shoulder, and I started flipping. Most of it was ordinary. Doctor appointments. The weather. What she made for supper. Then I got to March of 2022, and Karen was reading right along with me, and I felt her go still behind me.<\/p>\n
Mom had written,\u00a0\u201cDiane called again. We fought for an hour. She tells me I\u2019m wrong about the roof, wrong about the contractor. She exhausts me.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Karen sort of snorted, like, see, there it is. But Mom wasn\u2019t done. The next line said,\u00a0\u201cBut she\u2019s the only one who shows up.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nI felt Karen\u2019s jaw tighten. I didn\u2019t even have to look, I could feel it from where I sat.<\/p>\n
I kept turning pages because now I needed to know too. A few weeks later Mom wrote about Karen.\u00a0\u201cKaren visited Sunday. Brought flowers. Stayed forty minutes. Agreed with everything. She always agrees. It\u2019s its own kind of lonely.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0I read it out loud without thinking, and the second it was out of my mouth I wished I hadn\u2019t, because Karen made this small hurt sound behind me.<\/p>\n\u201cKeep going,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0she said. Her voice was flat.\u00a0\u201cRead the rest.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nSo I did. And the next entry, oh, the next one. Mom wrote,\u00a0\u201cI love them both. But I respect the one who fights. I trust Diane. I left her the house.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0There it was, in her own hand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I\u2019m not\u00a0proud<\/span>\u00a0of what I felt right then, but I\u2019ll tell you the truth. I felt like I\u2019d won. Thirty years of being the difficult daughter, and here was Mom in black and white telling me I was the one she counted on.<\/p>\n\n
\n
Karen pushed back from the table so hard her chair scraped the floor.\u00a0\u201cThere,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0she said.\u00a0\u201cYou happy now? You dragged me three hours for that?\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Her eyes were wet and mean at the same time.\u00a0\u201cShe always picked you. Even when you were screaming at her, she picked you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I should have stopped. Any decent sister would have closed the book and gone and hugged her. But I didn\u2019t. I was sitting there feeling\u00a0vindicated<\/span>, like I\u2019d earned something, and instead of letting it rest I flipped to the very back, to the last thing Mom ever wrote. I don\u2019t know why. I think part of me wanted one more line to wave in Karen\u2019s face.<\/p>\nThe last entry was barely legible. The handwriting had gone all loose and shaky, the way it did near the end. It was dated four days before she died. Four days. Karen was still standing by the counter with her arms crossed, but she came back when she saw my face change.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0she said.\u00a0\u201cWhat does it say.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nI read it slow because the words were hard to make out.\u00a0\u201cI need to tell both my girls something.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0My voice came out wrong.\u00a0\u201cAbout their father. About why he really left.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nKaren sat back down. Just lowered herself into the chair like her legs gave out. We were both leaning over it now, heads almost touching, the way we\u00a0used<\/span>\u00a0to when we were little and reading under the covers.<\/p>\n\u201cIt wasn\u2019t the drinking,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Mom had written. The next part she\u2019d pressed so hard the pen tore the paper a little.\u00a0\u201cHe found out Diane wasn\u2019t his. I let him think the worst of himself so he\u2019d go quiet. So nobody would ever know.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nI read it three times before it went in. Diane wasn\u2019t his. That\u2019s me. I\u2019m Diane.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
The kitchen got so quiet I could hear the clock over the stove. Karen had her hand over her mouth. There was one more line, smaller, like Mom ran out of room or out of nerve. It said,\u00a0\u201cI gave her the house because I owed her a father and never gave her one. It was never about trust. It was about the only thing I had left to give her.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n
\n
I just sat there. All of it, every bit of it, came apart in about four seconds. The man who smelled like pine soap. The reason nobody ever said I looked like him. The drinking story everyone repeated at every funeral and Christmas for fifty years.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
He didn\u2019t leave because he was a drunk. He left because of me. Because I existed. And Mom let the whole town believe he was the bad guy so I\u2019d never have to carry it.<\/p>\n
Karen finally spoke.\u00a0\u201cSo we\u2019re not even.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Her voice cracked.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re not even all the way sisters.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cHalf,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0I said. It was the only word I could get out.<\/p>\nShe reached across the table, not to fight this time. She put her hand on the open page, right over Mom\u2019s handwriting, like she could press it back into the paper and make it not true. I put my hand on top of hers. We didn\u2019t hug. We didn\u2019t cry the pretty way you see in movies. We just sat there with our hands stacked on a dead woman\u2019s secret, two old women who\u2019d spent six months not speaking over a house and a pile of money that neither of us cared about anymore.<\/p>\n
I won, see. I had the proof. Mom trusted me, it said so right there. I\u2019d been so sure that meant I was the good one all along. Karen drove home the next morning. We\u2019ve talked twice since then, both times short, both times careful. The house is still mine. The journal\u2019s in a drawer in my bedroom and I haven\u2019t opened it again, and to be honest I don\u2019t know that I ever will. I sit in the kitchen most mornings now with my coffee, in the house Mom left me because she owed me a father she couldn\u2019t give back, and I think the same thing every single day.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
She didn\u2019t leave me the house because she trusted me. She left it to me because she was sorry. And I spent thirty years too busy fighting her to ever once ask her why.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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