The Girl Who Wrote It Down

My mother takes her side

I called my mother before I called my sister, because some part of me needed to hear another adult in the family say the obvious thing out loud before I let myself feel the full size of it.

“She’s going through something,” my mother said, before I had even finished explaining. “You don’t know what it’s been like for her lately.”

“She emptied the account, Mom. Daddy’s account. Deana’s school money.”

“She borrowed it,” my mother said, the same way she has said it about my sister my whole life, about smaller things: a car she wrecked at nineteen, a credit card she ran up in her twenties, a wedding that never happened but that somebody still had to pay a deposit for. “Family helps family. You’ll figure it out. You always do.”

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being told, calmly, that your own daughter’s tuition money is a loan your sister is entitled to and you are simply the family member built sturdy enough to absorb the loss. I have felt that exhaustion my whole life in smaller versions. This was the first time it had a dollar figure attached large enough that I could not simply absorb it and move on.

I called my sister’s phone four times that afternoon. It went straight to voicemail every time. Around six that evening, a single text came through: a photo of her and her boyfriend at what looked like a backyard cookout somewhere, both of them smiling, a caption underneath that read only, I’m sorry. I’ll explain when things calm down. Please don’t call the bank on me.

I set the phone face down on the counter, and I slid down the cabinet to the kitchen floor, the same cracked linoleum my father laid himself the summer I turned six, and I cried in a way I had not let myself cry since his funeral.