The For Sale Sign In My Yard

“Nobody called me.”

“Well, he should have.” A pause, the kind she takes when she is deciding how to say something she has already decided to say. “Jo, it’s just the practical thing to do. You don’t need all this space. Not anymore. Not with Mark gone.”

Mark has been gone four years this October. Heart, in the hay field, on a Tuesday, the tractor still running when Dale Oster found him. I do not need my sister to remind me he is gone. I wake up every single morning in a house with his boots still by the back door, because I have not been able to move them, and that is the kind of thing you do not say out loud to someone who left for the city thirty years ago and calls twice a year.

“I’m farming a hundred and sixty acres by myself, Pam. I don’t need less space. I need help, and you’ve never once offered any.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it.”

She let that sit a second. Then she said the thing that actually stopped me cold, the thing I turned over in my head for the rest of that day and most of the next week.

“Jo. You’re not on this deed the way you think you are. Not yet. I’m the one the court named personal representative when Mama’s estate went through probate. Until that’s closed out, I’m the one who can list estate property. You’d know that if you’d ever once sat down with the paperwork instead of leaving it all to me.”

I had sat down with the paperwork. I had sat down with it for three straight years while our mother forgot my name in the mornings and remembered it again by supper, while our father’s lungs filled up slow from fifty years of grain dust until he needed a tank of oxygen just to make it to the mailbox. I had sat down with plenty. What I had not done, because nobody asked me to and because I was the one physically present changing bed linens at two in the morning, was get myself named to handle the legal end of things. Pam had a business degree and lived four hours away and so when it came time for Mama’s lawyer to pick somebody to be the responsible party on paper, it was Pam, because Pam was the one who could take a phone call in the middle of a Tuesday without leaving a parent unattended in a wheelchair.

It made sense at the time. It did not feel like it made sense standing in my kitchen with a For Sale sign visible through my own window.

“So you can put a sign in my yard without telling me,” I said, “but I can’t stop you.”