The Uncle They Were Ashamed Of

What was fair. As if any of them had spent one Saturday of the last fifteen years thinking about what was fair to me.

I want you to understand that I did not gloat. I did not send back a triumphant reply. I did not do anything at all, which I think was worse for them than if I had fought. I simply let the calls go to voicemail, and I drove up to the lake, and I started, slowly, learning how to live in a house that a man who loved me had left me on purpose.

The messages piled up. My brother’s, complaining that Warren had “always been strange” and that a will like that “clearly wasn’t in his right mind.” Monica’s, sweet at first, then not, calling me cold, calling me greedy, saying money had changed me. My mother’s, which I could not bring myself to delete, in which she cried and said family was everything and how could I turn my back on my own blood.

I turned my back on my own blood. I want to say that clearly. After they had spent fifteen years turning their backs on me, I finally, at fifty years old, turned mine, and I want to tell you that it felt like grief and freedom at the same time, in the same breath, and I did not know a person could feel both of those about the same thing until I did.

Then Monica went public.

My college roommate, a woman named Sharon who has stayed my friend for thirty years and is the only person who ever consistently invited me to anything, called me one morning and said, “Gail, you need to see what your sister posted.”

I opened my computer. There was a fundraiser. My sister had made a public fundraiser online, with photographs of my mother’s Florida house and claims about medical bills, and a long, tearful paragraph about how the family had fallen on hard times and how one member of the family, who had been left a great deal of money by a beloved relative, had abandoned her aging mother and refused to help. My name was not in it. She did not have to use my name. Everyone who mattered knew.

It had hundreds of shares. It had comments. Strangers I had never met were calling me heartless. And underneath it, Monica had posted a photograph of herself standing on a dock, my dock, Warren’s dock, that she must have taken during the funeral she did not otherwise attend, with a caption about long walks along the shore with our dear Uncle Warren, and all the wisdom he shared, and how much she would miss their talks.

She had never been to that house. Not once. In all the years I drove up there, in all the years Warren lived on that lake, my sister set foot on that property exactly one time, at the funeral, long enough to take a photograph.