…mother’s green cardigan. The one I’d buried her in. Or thought I had.
I sat on my bedroom floor and watched the clip over and over. A woman with gray-streaked hair and my mother’s green cardigan, standing behind my husband, Paul, at our daughter’s crib. She leaned over and touched Rosie’s hair. Then she turned toward the camera, just for a second.
It was my sister. Anna.
I hadn’t spoken to Anna in nine years. We’d fallen out after our mother’s funeral, over the house we grew up in. She’d wanted to keep it. I’d needed my half of the money. We sold it to strangers. She told me I’d sold our childhood, and she hung up, and that was that.
I didn’t know how she’d gotten into my house. I didn’t know why my husband was whispering about “the other house” to our toddler. I didn’t know anything except that my heart was pounding so hard I couldn’t breathe.
When Paul got home at seven, I was waiting in the kitchen with the tablet. I didn’t say anything. I just turned the screen toward him and pressed play.
He watched it. Then he sighed, and laughed a little, and rubbed his face. “Well,” he said. “That’s ruined.”
“What is?”
“Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way. I promise you’re going to want to see this.”
We drove forty minutes with Rosie asleep in her car seat. He wouldn’t tell me anything. And then he turned onto a street I hadn’t been on in nine years. Willow Lane. And pulled into the driveway of a little yellow house with a crooked porch.
My mother’s house. The house I grew up in.
The porch light was on. Anna was standing in the doorway, wearing Mom’s green cardigan, crying.
Paul had found the listing four months ago. The family who’d bought it from us were selling. He’d remembered how I cried when we sold it, every year on Mom’s birthday. So he tracked down Anna, nervous, through a cousin. He asked her if she’d go in on it with us. Half and half. The way it should have been the first time.
Anna said yes before he finished the sentence. She’d been looking at the listing herself, every day, too proud to call me.
They’d closed last week. They’d been planning to surprise me on Mom’s birthday. Anna had come to our house that afternoon to drop off the keys and see Rosie for the first time. Paul couldn’t help himself. He’d whispered to a sleeping baby about “the other house,” like she could keep a secret.
And the cardigan? Anna had taken it from Mom’s closet before the funeral and kept it for nine years. I’d buried our mother in a blue one. I’d never noticed.
I walked up the porch steps. Anna and I stood there looking at each other. Nine years of things to say. Neither of us said any of them. We just held on.
We spend every Sunday at the yellow house now. Anna and I are slowly fixing the porch. Rosie has her own room, the one that used to be mine. Paul says it was the best money he ever spent. Anna says it was the best idea he ever stole from her.
