The Plate My Sister Threw Over My House

The plate hit the wall about a foot to the left of my head, and for a second the only sound in that kitchen was the pieces of it coming down onto the floor, soft and quick, like the last of the rain running off the roof after the storm has already moved up the valley.

It was one of our mother’s plates. The good ones. Blue Willow, the set with the little bridge and the two birds, the dishes she kept in the corner cupboard behind the glass for fifty years and brought out on Easter and Christmas and the day each of her grandchildren was baptized. My sister picked one up off my counter and threw it at my head because I would not sign my house over to her, and the thing I remember most is not the fear. It is that she reached for Mom’s plate to do it. Of everything in that room she could have grabbed, she reached for the one thing that was supposed to mean our mother.

I want to tell you the whole of it, because for a long time the only version going around our town was the one my sister told, and hers was a lie, and I have learned that a lie told loud enough and long enough will stand up straight in a room until somebody finally says out loud what everybody already knows. Somebody finally did. It was not me.

My name is Nora. I am forty-seven years old, and I have lived my whole life within fifteen miles of the farmhouse my great-grandfather built on the old Perry Road outside a little town called Benner’s Creek, in the ridge-and-valley country of northern Pennsylvania, where the hemlocks come right down to the creek and the first week of December the whole town goes quiet because the men are up on the ridge for deer. It is not a fancy place. It is a feed store and a fire hall and two churches and a diner that still does a liver and onions special on Thursdays. It is the kind of town you leave or you do not, and I did not. My sister Diane left. That is where a lot of this really begins, long before the plate.

Diane is four years older than me. She got out at eighteen, went to college two hours south, married a man named Craig who sells industrial heating systems and does well at it, and settled in a development outside Harrisburg with a three-car garage and a kitchen island bigger than my mother’s whole kitchen. There is nothing wrong with any of that. Diane worked for what she has and she is sharp as a tack, and when we were girls I thought she hung the moon. I followed her around the yard like a duckling.

But something happens to some people when they get a little ways up the hill. They look back down at where they came from and they do not see home anymore. They see something smaller than they are now. Diane came back less and less, and when she did she stood in our mother’s kitchen with her arms crossed and her nose just slightly up, and she called everything “charming” in a way that meant the opposite.