Chapter 4: The Deed and the Promise
Erica arrived at my house at half past eleven.
She didn't knock.
She rang the bell twice, quickly, the way she always did when she considered herself the one in a hurry and everyone else simply slow to respond.
I opened the door.
She was still dressed for the resort — linen trousers, a silk blouse, sunglasses pushed up into her hair.
Her husband Derek was not with her.
She had come alone.
She looked past me into the house.
"Where are they?"
"Watching something in the living room," I said.
"They're fine."
She moved to step inside.
I didn't move out of the doorway.
"Erica," I said.
"Before you take them.
We need to talk."
Her jaw tightened.
"I don't have time for—"
"You told me to ask Mom about the house," I said.
"I asked her.
So now we're talking."
She studied me for a moment.
Then she stepped back slightly and crossed her arms.
"Fine," she said.
"What do you want to know?"
"Why did you tell me?
You could have kept that quiet.
You were angry, but you're not careless.
You said it on purpose."
Something moved across her face.
Not guilt exactly.
Something more like relief that someone had finally asked the right question.
"Because I'm tired," she said.
"Because I've been carrying it for four years and Mom keeps acting like it was simple and it wasn't simple."
"Tell me what it was."
She looked past me again, checking that the boys were out of earshot.
Then she looked back.
"Dad didn't put my name on the house because he was worried about my marriage," she said.
"That's what Mom told you.
That's not what happened."
"Then what happened?"
"He put my name on it because Mom asked him to.
Because she wanted to make sure that if anything happened to her, the house wouldn't have to be split.
She wanted it to stay whole.
She chose me to hold it." She paused.
"She told Dad you wouldn't mind.
That you were practical.
That you'd understand."
I felt something shift in my chest.
Not surprise exactly.
More like the sensation of a picture coming into focus that you had been looking at slightly wrong for years.
"She decided that without asking me," I said.
"Yes."
"And you knew."
"I found out after the funeral.
She told me then." Erica's arms were still crossed, but her shoulders had dropped slightly.
"I told her it wasn't right.
She said it was already done and that you'd never need to know."
"But you just told me."
"Because you threatened to call child services on me," she said, and there was a flash of the old sharpness.
"And because—" She stopped.
"Because what?"
She looked at the ground for a moment.
When she looked back up, something in her face was different.
Older, somehow.
"Because she's been doing it to both of us," she said quietly.
"Just in different directions.
She made you feel like the dependable one so you'd keep showing up.
She made me feel like the chosen one so I'd keep being grateful.
And neither of us ever questioned it because it felt like love."
The street behind her was quiet.
A bird was going somewhere in the oak tree at the edge of my yard.
"I'm not saying what I did to Abigail was right," Erica said.
"It wasn't.
I knew it wasn't.
I told myself it was fine and I knew it wasn't." She said it flatly, without decoration, the way people speak when they are done performing.
"I'm sorry for that.
I mean it."
I looked at her for a long moment.
"That doesn't fix it," I said.
"I know."
"Abigail spent a day being used by people she trusted.
She came home and she didn't even tell me because she'd already learned that their comfort mattered more than her feelings.
My twelve-year-old already learned that.
From us.
From this family."
Erica didn't argue.
She didn't reach for a justification.
She just stood there and let it land.
"I know," she said again.
Behind me, I heard small feet on the hallway floor.
Sam appeared at my side, looked up at his mother, and then leaned against my leg without saying anything.
Erica looked down at him.
Something crossed her face that I hadn't seen in a long time.
"Hi, baby," she said softly.
"Hi, Mommy."
She crouched down to his level.
"Did Aunt Megan take good care of you?"
"She made eggs," he said.
"With the cheese inside."
"That's her best thing," Erica said.
She stood back up.
Her eyes were wet.
She didn't wipe them.
"We still need to talk about the house," I said.
"Not today.
But we do."
"I know," she said.
"We do."
She gathered the boys' bags from inside the door.
Ben came running from the living room, already talking about something he'd seen on television.
Sam took his mother's hand.
At the bottom of the porch steps, Erica paused.
"Megan," she said.
"When you talk to Mom.
Be ready.
She's not going to make it easy."
She said it like a warning.
Like someone who had been in that conversation before and had not come out of it well.
I watched her buckle the boys into the car.
I watched her pull away.
Then I went inside and sat at the kitchen table where Ben and Sam had eaten breakfast, and I thought about my mother, and the deed, and the four years of silence that had been sitting inside a promise I never knew was made.
And I thought: she's right.
May you like
Mom won't make it easy.
But I was no longer interested in easy.
