The Rent My Sister Kept

I would have known my sister’s car anywhere. It has a dent in the rear bumper from a mailbox in 2019, and a sticker on the glass that says Jesus Is My Co-Pilot, and I used to think that was funny.

She stopped the car in the middle of the street.

Then, slowly, she pulled to the curb behind Lester’s truck. She sat with her hands on the wheel. Across the street, Dolores Mabry’s husband leaned his rake against the porch rail and Dolores folded her arms.

Marsha got out of the car. She is forty-nine and she looks forty. She wore her good gray church coat and carried a brown purse tight against her ribs, and she walked up the front walk like a woman walking into cold water.

I went out on the porch and met her at the top of the steps. Lester got to his feet beside the step he had been working on and stood quietly with the drill in his hand.

“Lori,” Marsha said. Her voice was thin. “What’s going on? Why is everybody. What are you doing here?”

“Mom’s inside,” I said. “She’s been waiting for you.”

My voice stayed down. I have a temper, and for a year I had told myself that if I ever caught my sister in a lie I would take her apart in front of God and the county. But standing on my mother’s boards, all the heat went out of me. What was left was quiet.

“Go on in,” I said. “Mom’s at the kitchen table. She’d like you to sit down.”

Marsha looked at me. Her mouth was trembling.

“Lori, I can explain.”

“I know you can,” I said. “That is not what Mom is asking for.”

“Lori.” My mother’s voice came from the kitchen, not loud, but it carried. “Bring her out here. I will say this on the porch.”

Marsha turned white.

“Mom, please. Not out here. Not with everyone.”

“Everyone knew before I did,” Mom said, appearing in the hall with the walker, Jolene holding the baby behind her. “I would like to be the last to be embarrassed about it. Come on out, Marsha. It is a pretty day.”

She came out onto her own porch, one rolling step at a time, and Lester got her to the swing with a hand under her elbow. She lowered herself onto the little blue cushion and set her pocketbook beside her.

Then she put her hands in her lap and looked at her daughter.

I had never seen my mother look at Marsha like that. It was not anger. It was a long, level grief, and it was harder to stand in front of.

“Mother, I,” Marsha began.

“I’ll tell it, and you tell me if I get any of it wrong,” Mom said. “Last fall, while I was still in the rehab bed, you listed my house on the computer for eleven hundred dollars a month. You told a young couple who had been living in a motel with a little boy that I was in a care home and not right in my mind.

You took first month and a deposit, twenty-two hundred dollars, in cash.”

Marsha’s lips moved. No sound came out.

“Every first since November you have stood on this porch and taken eleven hundred dollars from these people. Twelve months. That is thirteen thousand, two hundred dollars. I did the sum on the back of an envelope.”