The orange juice was the kind with no pulp, because Marco hated pulp, and Mom still bought it ten years later like he might check.
That’s what I was staring at when it started. The carton. Not the fourth plate.
I’m Jordyn. I was born four minutes after my brother, at the same time as my sister, Fernanda. Marco ran our house on those four minutes. He refereed every fight we had, saved Fernanda the green gummy bears, tied my laces before the bus, and slept in the middle when it stormed. He got sick at nine. He was gone at ten.
After that, Fernanda and I went to separate corners of the same sad house and stayed there. Ten birthdays. Ten cakes cut in half by two girls who didn’t look up.
So on the Saturday we turned twenty, in Saginaw, at nine in the morning, I parked, she parked behind me, and we hugged on the porch like two people who’d been seated together at a wake.
Silver balloons on the chairs. Cake on the hutch. Three of us. Four plates.
Nobody said a word about the fourth one.
Halfway through the eggs, Mom left the table. She came back hugging a blue cookie tin with a dent in one corner, and the lid was chattering because her hands wouldn’t stop. She put it down between us. Taped on top was a yellowed envelope with Marco’s capitals leaning left across it.
OPEN ON OUR 20TH BIRTHDAY.
Fernanda’s fork dropped.
“He packed it in the hospital,” Mom said behind her hand. “He told me, ‘They’ll still need me when they’re grown.'”
Under the table, cold fingers found mine. Fernanda’s. The first time in ten years.
I gripped back and lifted the lid with my free hand.
The green ones
It was a sandwich bag of green gummy bears.
Only green. Maybe forty of them, fused into one lumpy brick the color of a pond, ten years past any date a food is supposed to have.
Fernanda made a sound I’d never heard from her. A laugh with the bottom fallen out.
“He saved them,” she said. “He was on that IV and he was still picking out the green ones.”
“The nurses brought him a bag every Friday,” Mom said. “He’d sort them on his tray table. I thought he was bored.”
I set the brick on the fourth plate. It seemed like where it went.
Under it were two envelopes, the white kind from the gift shop downstairs, sealed with so much tape they looked bandaged. One said FERNANDA. One said JORDYN. And under each name, in smaller letters he’d clearly struggled to keep on the line:
DONT READ YOURS. GIVE IT TO THE OTHER ONE.
“Of course,” Fernanda said. “Of course he made rules.”
Under the envelopes was a sheet of notebook paper folded in four. I didn’t open that yet. My hand wouldn’t.
Fernanda let go of me to slide my envelope across the table. I slid hers back. It was the most we’d passed each other in a decade, and it was paper.
“You go first,” I said.
“You always make me go first.”
“You always go first anyway.”
She looked at me then. Really looked, the way you look at a stranger you’re trying to place. Then she tore it open.
His handwriting got worse inside. You could tell where he got tired.
She read it out loud, because the envelope said to.
“Fernanda. This is Jordyn’s secret but she told it to me so I get to decide. She is scared that you only like her because of me. She says you laugh at my jokes, not hers, and when I’m not there you’ll have no reason to be her sister. She told me in the storm. She made me swear. I’m breaking it because I’m in charge.”
Fernanda stopped. Her mouth was still open on the next word.
I wanted to grab the paper and eat it. I want that on the record. Twenty years old and my plan was to swallow a dead kid’s letter at a birthday breakfast.
“Keep going,” Mom said.
“She’s wrong,” Fernanda read. “But she won’t believe me. She’ll believe you. So tell her. P.S. Don’t let her double-knot.”
She put the letter down very flat on the tablecloth and pressed both palms on it like it might lift off.
“You thought that?” she said. “When you were nine?”
“I think it now,” I said.
It came out before I could do anything about it. Mom closed her eyes.
Fernanda pushed the other envelope at me. “Read mine. Read it right now.”
My fingers were stupid with the tape. Mom handed me the butter knife. I cut it open like a letter from the IRS.
“Jordyn. This is Fernanda’s secret. She is scared you’ll hate her. She says she’s the loud one and the bossy one and you only put up with her because I’m in the middle. She says if I’m gone you’ll pick your own room and shut the door. She cried about it in the bathroom so nobody would hear. I heard. Tell her you won’t.”
I read the next line twice in my head before I could say it.
“I already know you’ll both do it anyway. You’re terrible at brave. So I made a plan.”
That was where I stopped. Because I had shut the door. The first week after the funeral, I’d shut it, and she’d stood outside it, and I’d heard her stand there, and I’d turned the radio up.
Fernanda was crying now with her whole face, the way she used to at six when she lost at Uno.
“You turned the radio up,” she said.
The door
I would like to tell you we hugged.
What happened is Fernanda stood up so fast her chair went over backward and took a silver balloon down with it. The balloon bobbed along the floor toward the kitchen like it wanted no part of this.
“Ten years,” she said. “I stood in that hallway every night for a month.”
“You never knocked.”
“You turned the radio UP, Jordyn. What was I supposed to knock through, Journey?”
Mom said, “Girls,” the way she used to say it about the bathroom.
Neither of us heard her.
“You stopped coming to my room first,” I said. “Before the funeral. You slept on the couch.”
“Because his bed was across from mine and I couldn’t look at it. You had your own room. You had a door. I had a made bed with nobody in it.”
That landed. I hadn’t known that. I’d known it the way you know the weather in another state.
“So you went to the couch,” I said, “and I figured you’d picked.”
“Picked what?”
“Not me.”
She laughed, ugly. “There was nobody else to pick. There was you, and Mom crying in the garage, and Dad watching golf with the sound off.”
Mom flinched at the garage. She’d thought we never knew.
And then Fernanda said the thing. She’d been carrying it ten years and she put it down in front of everybody.
“You were the one he tied laces for. You were the one he worried about. And when he died you didn’t even cry at the service. You stood there in the gray hoodie, my hoodie, and you didn’t cry, and I thought, she doesn’t need anybody. She never needed me. She needed him.”
The gray hoodie. I still had it. It was in my car.
I’d worn it to the service because it was the last thing all three of us fought over and he’d ruled in my favor. I didn’t cry because I’d promised him in the ward I’d stop making the weird worried face. I took him literally. I was ten.
I opened my mouth to say all of that and what came out was, “It’s mine. He said it was mine.”
Fernanda stared at me.
Then she grabbed her keys off the hutch, next to the cake, and walked out the front door.
Not slammed. Closed. Which was worse. A slam you can argue with.
Mom and I sat there with the fourth plate and the brick of green gummy bears and two opened letters.
“Well,” I said. “Happy birthday to us.”
Mom didn’t laugh. She reached across and picked up the folded notebook paper I hadn’t opened.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “And he made me promise something about it.”
“What?”
“That if you two fought, I wasn’t allowed to fix it. He said I’d just make it nice. He said you had to do it.”
“He was ten.”
“He was ten,” she agreed, “and he was right about me.”
She held the paper out. I didn’t take it.
“She’s sitting in her car,” Mom said. “She hasn’t started it.”
I looked out the front window. Fernanda’s Civic was right behind mine where she’d parked. She had her forehead on the steering wheel.
The old version of me would have waited for her to come back in. That’s what I’d done for ten years. Waited for her to go first, because she always went first, and resented her for going first.
I took the paper. I didn’t read it. I took the gray hoodie out of my back seat on the way past.
I knocked on her window.
She didn’t look up. “Go away.”
“I’m not good at this,” I said. “I’m terrible at brave. Someone told me.”
She lifted her head. Her mascara was a disaster.
I held up the hoodie. “You can have it.”
“I don’t want your hoodie.”
“It’s your hoodie,” I said. “He ruled for me because I was crying about the bus. He told me later. He said you’d get over it because you always laughed. I let you think I won.”
She looked at the hoodie through the glass for a long time.
Then she unlocked the door.
The treaty
We read the last sheet in the car, the hoodie across both our laps like a blanket, the engine off and the windows going gray with our breathing.
It was ruled notebook paper with a cartoon fish drawn in the corner, the same fish that was painted on the ward wall, which he must have copied looking up from his bed.
At the top, in the big leaning capitals:
REFEREES TREATY.
Underneath, in pencil, numbered.
“One. Nobody shuts a door for more than one night.”
Fernanda made a noise.
“Two. Green ones go to Fernanda. Jordyn gets the red. Nobody gets the white, the white are bad.”
“Three. If it storms you sleep in the middle of each other. You figure it out. I’m not drawing it.”
“Four. Four minutes is a thing. I’m still the oldest.”
“Five. On our birthday you look at each other when you cut the cake. Not at the cake. At each other.”
That one stopped both of us. We’d done ten cakes looking at the knife.
And then at the bottom, three lines.
On the first one, in pencil pressed so hard it had gone through the paper in places: MARCO, OLDEST, REFEREE.
The other two were blank.
“He knew,” Fernanda said. “He knew we’d do exactly this.”
“He told Mom,” I said. “That’s why she’s not allowed to fix it.”
We went back inside. Mom had picked up the chair and caught the balloon and was standing in the dining room holding a pen, not offering it, just holding it.
Fernanda took it from her.
“Wait,” I said. “Rule one.”
“What about it?”
“I owe you about three thousand six hundred nights.”
Fernanda looked at the paper, then at me, and the corner of her mouth went up the exact way it used to when Marco held his hand up like a stop sign.
“We’ll do installments,” she said.
She signed on the second line. FERNANDA. Then, after a second, she added: LATE.
I took the pen. I signed on the third. JORDYN, and under it, because I could not help it: ALSO LATE.
Mom made a sound and sat down hard in the chair at the fourth plate. Marco’s chair. Nobody had sat in it in ten years.
She put her face in her hands, and this time she didn’t go to the garage.
Fernanda went to one side of her and I went to the other, and we stood there with our arms around her and each other, and Mom said into her own wrists, “He told me you’d sign it in the car. He bet me a dollar.”
“Who won?” Fernanda said.
“Him,” Mom said. “Obviously.”
We cut the cake at eleven-thirty. Mom got the knife. Fernanda and I held it together, which is a bad way to cut a cake, and we did rule five like we were taking a test. We looked at each other. She had frosting on her chin by the second slice and I didn’t tell her for twenty minutes.
Mom put the treaty back in the tin with the letters. The gummy bear brick stayed on the fourth plate, and nobody touched it, and nobody suggested throwing it out.
That night it rained. Not thunder, just rain, which honestly I counted.
I was in my old bedroom. Fernanda was on the couch, because she still can’t sleep across from his bed, and we didn’t pretend about that.
I lay there a few minutes pretending I was fine. Then I gave up and went down the stairs in the dark with my pillow.
She was awake. She lifted the end of the blanket without saying anything, and I got in on the other end, and our feet met in the middle of the couch where he would have been.
“This is stupid,” she said. “We’re twenty.”
“Rule three,” I said.
She was quiet for a while. The rain kept on.
“I’m in charge,” she said.
“You’re not the oldest.”
“He’s not here to referee,” she said, and pushed her cold feet against mine, and kept them there.
If this one got to you, send it to the brother or sister you haven’t called in too long.
Stories of families facing unexpected heartbreak and showing up for one another continue in “My Boss Called My Six-Year-Old a Complaint in His Firefighter Coat” and “My Son Carried a Stranger’s Baby Home Through Our Park”. For another story about enduring a painful moment with courage, read “A Basketball Captain Knocked My Ear Into the Gravel Behind the Bus Barn”.
