“Because you couldn’t look at any of it. You couldn’t even walk past his door for a year. I took what I thought would hurt you most, and I kept it until you were strong enough.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“I didn’t need to ask. I saw you, Diane. You were disappearing.”
I set the key on her coffee table.
She stared at it like it was alive.
“He gave that to Ruth,” I said. “The hospice volunteer. He gave it to a stranger, Marlene. Do you understand what that means? My son gave his rabbit to a woman he barely knew because he did not trust you to give me his things.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then why was he right?”
She started to cry.
I did not.
“The trust fund,” I said. “You told me it was gone. Treatments, you said. Every last dollar. Was it, Marlene?”
“Diane.”
“Was it?”
She could not answer. She put her face in her hands. Anatomy
“I was helping him too,” she whispered. “I was there, every night, when you couldn’t be. I took time off work. I lost clients.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“I only meant a little. To make it fair. And then it kept, it kept.”
Her voice broke on the last word, and I felt the floor shift under me, because I had come here half-hoping she would look at me like I was crazy, like I had built a monster out of a key and a note.
I looked at my sister, this woman who had brought me casseroles and picked out Ethan’s little suit for the funeral, and I understood that I had never really seen her.
Not once.
Not in 40 years.
“Ruth kept her promise,” I said. “A woman he knew for six weeks kept her promise. And you couldn’t.”
“Diane, please.” She sank deeper into the couch, her face pale, her hands trembling in her lap. “I only did it because I loved him too.”
I stood in her living room, and I realized love was never what my sister had been protecting.
I picked up the key.
