The Plate My Sister Threw Over My House

Seven years. I want to say that number plainly because numbers are the one thing a person cannot argue with later, although my sister certainly tried. Seven years I lived in that house and cared for my mother. I learned to give her the pills on the schedule the body does not want. I learned to get her up off the floor without hurting her or me. I bathed my mother. I cut her food small near the end when she could not manage a knife. I sat up with her through the long bad nights when the shaking would not let her sleep and she would hold my hand and tell me stories about my father, the same three stories, over and over, and I never once told her she had told me already, because the telling was the only thing that still made her face young.

And I will tell you something that is going to sound hard. During those seven years, my sister came home for Christmas and when it was convenient, and she came home to tell us how things ought to be done, how we should get Mom into “a facility,” how I was “enabling her” by letting her stay in her own home, how there were professionals for this. Diane said the word professionals the way some people say the name of the Lord, like it settled everything. And then she would drive back up the hill to Harrisburg, and I would be there Monday morning with the pills.

Now. The house.

My mother’s house was paid off a long time ago, my father had seen to that before he died, but there were still the taxes and the roof that went bad in the fifth year and the furnace that died the following February on the coldest night of a cold winter, and I paid for those things. Me. Out of a cafeteria paycheck. I took out a small loan against the little place Rick and I had, and I put a roof on my mother’s farmhouse and a furnace in it and paid it back over four years, forty dollars at a time, and I never said one word to anybody about it. It was my mother. It was cold. You fix the furnace.

I tell you that so you understand what “my paid off house” means, which my sister would later throw around like I had been handed something. I had not been handed anything. I had carried it.

My mother died on a Tuesday in March, three springs ago now, in the bedroom where she was born, with me holding one hand and Dot Kreider from the next farm holding the other and the first warm wind of the year coming through the window she asked me to open. It was a good death, as those things go. She was not afraid. The last thing she said that made full sense, she said to me, and she said, “You stayed.” Just that. “You stayed.” And then she was mostly gone into the fog those last two days, and then she was gone all the way.

After the funeral, which that church kitchen put on for her the way she had put it on for everybody else for thirty-one years, every casserole in the county on that table, after all of that, we found out what my mother had done with the house.

She left it to me.

Not the money, there was almost none, my mother lived on Social Security and what my father had left. There was the house and the forty acres around it that now mostly grew hemlock and memories, and she left all of it to me, and she had done it years before, right after she got sick, clean and plain the way she did everything. And she had told people. That is the thing my sister never understood about our mother. Ruth Alberta did not do things in the dark. She told her sister. She told Dot Kreider. She told the pastor. She told anyone who would listen why she was leaving the house to Nora, and the reason was always the same four words. “Because Nora came home.”