The journal sat closed on the kitchen table between us, and I’d already gone and set my coffee mug down too close, so there was a ring soaking into the cover before either of us said anything.

Karen had driven three hours to be here. We hadn’t spoken since we buried Mom in March, not a real word, and now here we were, two grown women in our sixties acting like we were back in the bedroom we used to share, still keeping score.

I’ll be honest with you. I made the coffee just to have something to do with my hands.

Mom left me the house. Three hundred and ten thousand dollars, give or take, that’s what the realtor figured. Karen got the savings, which came to twenty-two thousand and some change. You can imagine how that went over. Karen has said to my face, more than once, “Mom loved me more, she just felt guilty about you.” And I’d say back, calm as anything, “Mom didn’t love you more, Karen. She trusted me more.” That word, trusted, I held onto it like a life raft. The house wasn’t about love. It was about who Mom believed could handle the truth of things. That’s what I told myself anyway.

Here’s the thing about my sister and me. We were never alike, not even as kids. Karen was the easy one. Soft voice, always agreed, never made a fuss at the dinner table. Mom used to call her “my little sunshine.” Me, I was the one who argued, who’d tell Mom her contractor was robbing her blind and her roof guy was a crook and she needed to stop letting people walk on her. We fought all the time, Mom and me.

Over money, over her doctors, over whether she should even still be driving. I drove her crazy. I knew it then and I know it now.

And our dad, well, that’s a whole other thing. Dad left when I was eleven and Karen was nine. The story we always got, the story Mom told the relatives, was that it was the drinking. He drank, it got bad, he left, end of story. I grew up believing that. Mind you, I barely remembered him. A big quiet man who smelled like cigarettes and pine soap. People in town always said Karen had his eyes. Nobody ever said I looked like anybody.