The Plate My Sister Threw Over My House

I have not told you about Dale yet. Dale is the youngest, three years behind me, the kind of man that life is always just about to work out for. There is always a deal about to come through, a check about to clear. He has a good heart buried under forty years of bad decisions, and at the time all this was happening he was in a hole, money-wise, the kind with collectors calling. And my sister, who is nobody’s fool, understood that a man in a hole will climb into whatever rope is lowered to him and not look too hard at who is holding the other end.

So Diane went to Dale and said, in effect, that the house ought to be sold and the money split three ways, and that if Dale would stand with her, there would be a check in it for him. The kind that makes the phone stop ringing.

Dale did the math a man in a hole does. And my brother, who I taught to ride a bike, who I covered for a hundred times with our father, called me one night about eight months after we lost Mom and told me, in a voice he had clearly rehearsed, that it “wasn’t right,” that Mom “wasn’t herself at the end,” that the fair thing, the Christian thing, would be to sell the family home and divide it equal three ways. He actually used the word Christian. My brother, who had not been inside Mount Zion since our mother’s funeral, told me what the Christian thing was.

I told Dale no. I told him I loved him and I told him no, and I told him I knew exactly who had put those words in his mouth, and he hung up on me, and that was the last ordinary conversation I had with my brother for a long time.

So that is the ground the plate landed on. It was not really about a plate, or even about a house. It was about a story my sister needed to be true, that she was owed, that she had been cheated by the sister who stayed. She had told it to so many people by then that I think she believed it all the way down, and a person who believes they have been robbed will do things a person who knows better never would.

She came to the house on a Saturday in October. Leaf season, the ridge all gold and rust. She called first, which she never did, and said she wanted to “sit down like adults and work this out,” and God help me I was glad. I thought, finally. I thought we were going to be sisters again. I made coffee. I put out the little lemon cookies she liked when we were girls. I set two cups on the kitchen table, our mother’s table, the gray Formica one with the chrome legs that has been in that kitchen since 1961.

She did not come alone. She brought Shelby.

Shelby is Diane’s daughter, my niece, and she was sixteen that fall, and she is, I have to tell you, the one bright coin in all of this. She used to spend two weeks with us every summer on the farm when she was little, and she loved my mother, her grandmother, with her whole heart. I was surprised to see her. I thought it was a good sign. I thought, maybe this really is about family.