“…opened theirs,” the lawyer finished. And my sister took a blue-ribboned envelope out of her purse and laid it on the table. The ribbon was untied. The seal was broken. “Mom gave it to me in March,” Cassie said quietly. “She told me to read it before the funeral. I did. That’s why I haven’t stopped crying.”
She slid it across to me. I knew my mother’s handwriting before I read a word. “Cassie, my girl. I know about the debt. I know about the house in Miami and the lawyer and the man who left you with all of it. You never told your sister because you were ashamed. I am leaving you everything on paper so the bank cannot take your children’s home. Pay it all. Then give your sister my house. She’ll understand. She always does.”
I looked up at my sister. She was shaking. I had spent three years angry that she never visited. She hadn’t visited because she couldn’t afford the plane ticket. She had been drowning eleven hundred miles away, and Mom had known, and I hadn’t.
The lawyer cleared his throat and opened the second envelope, the one with my name on it. Inside was the deed to Mom’s house, already signed over to me, dated in March. And a short note. “You visited every Sunday. You never asked for anything. That’s why I’m asking you for something now. Take care of your sister.”
The third envelope was for the lawyer, with instructions. The fourth one said only: “For whichever of my girls asks about the blue ribbon first.” He handed it to me. Inside was a photo of Cassie and me as little girls, asleep in the same bed, holding hands. On the back, Mom had written: “This is all I ever wanted to leave you.”
Cassie and I sold nothing. She moved back to our hometown in the summer with her two boys, into the house where we grew up. I come over every Sunday, like I used to. We sit at Mom’s table and drink her coffee from her mugs, and some Sundays, we don’t talk about anything at all.
