The House I Bought Back

The Apartment In Maryville

Here is the part I have the hardest time with.

I did not know.

Judy told me she was downsizing. She told me the house was too much to keep up alone, which was true in a way that let me believe it. She told me the HOA was “a headache,” which is the exact phrase, and I said something like “they always are,” and we talked about something else.

She was my sister and she was four years older than me and she had been taking care of me since I was six, and she could not make herself tell me that a committee of her neighbors had taken her house away over a wheelchair ramp.

I think she was ashamed. I think that is the whole answer and I think it is unbearable.

I cleaned out that apartment in April of last year, by myself, over a weekend.

It was four hundred and ninety square feet. The living room window faced the parking lot and the dumpster enclosure, and the blinds were the vinyl kind that came with the unit.

She had hung things. That is what got me. She had hung the good framed photographs from the house, all eleven of them, in a place she had lived for fourteen months and never once invited me to.

I had asked to come. Twice. She said she wanted to get it sorted first.

There was a set of dining chairs from the house, four of them, in an apartment with a kitchen table that seated two. She had kept all four. They were stacked in the bedroom against the wall.

The thing I could not deal with was the garage door opener. It was in the drawer by the stove with the takeout menus, a plastic clip on visor remote for a garage that belonged to somebody else by then, in a building that did not have one.

I sat down on her kitchen floor holding it and I stayed there long enough that my leg went numb.

I am fine now. It has been a year and a half and I am fine. I put that in because when people read a story like this they want to know whether the person telling it is all right, and mostly I am, and the garage door opener is in the drawer by my stove in the house on Hollow Creek Court, and I have not thrown it away and I am not going to.

The folder was in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, under the tax returns. It is an accordion folder, the green kind, and she had labeled the tab in her own handwriting with one word.

HOUSE.

Every letter. Every notice. Every fine, in order. Copies of everything she sent back. The denied variance. The minutes of the meeting. The attorney’s letter. The lien. The writ.

And in the very back, in a plastic sleeve, the original approved building plans from 1998 and a photograph of Doug on the finished ramp in April 2019, in his chair, at the top, at the door, grinning like he had built a cathedral.

I sat on the floor of my dead sister’s empty apartment and read the whole folder in order, which took me about two hours, and when I got to the end I understood that I had let her carry that alone for four years because I did not ask one more question.