My older brother was on my couch the evening I carried my last box into the house my godmother left me, his wife’s Christmas tree already lit in my window and our baby brother’s suitcase open on my bench. “It’s the family’s house now, Evie,” he said. I said, “Okay.” None of them had read the line she put in her will.
I’d been waiting two years to live in that house.
Mrs. Whitfield had been Mom’s best friend since grade school, and when she died at eighty-eight she skipped her own nephews and left the brick ranch in Oshkosh to me, the goddaughter who drove her to dialysis every Tuesday.
I’d sold my condo in September to cover the back taxes and the new furnace.
There was no place to go back to.
When I pulled into the driveway that Saturday, the porch light was on.
So was every light in the kitchen.
I’d switched off each one of them on Wednesday.
Stuart had his shoes off and his socks up on my ottoman.
Rhoda was taking my mugs out of the cupboard by the sink and lining them up in the one over the stove.
Mario’s gray suitcase sat open on the bench by the back door, half his sweaters still folded inside.
A polka station was coming out of a radio I didn’t own.
“How did you get in?” I said.
“Garage code,” Mario said. “Mom had it written in her address book.”
“That was for emergencies.”
“Well,” Stuart said. “Here we are.”
He smiled at me over his reading glasses the way he smiles at a waitress who brought the wrong soup.
“We all talked at Thanksgiving,” he said. “You weren’t there.”
“I was here. Sanding her back stairs.”
“Exactly. So we decided.”
Rhoda didn’t turn around from the cupboard.
“She was like a sister to your mother, Evie. It’s not like it’s yours yours.”
It had worked this way since I was nine.
Stuart decided.
Rhoda, once she married in, seconded.
Mario got the bigger room.
And I was the one who’d be fine with it.
I didn’t fight.
I put my palm on the doorframe Mrs. Whitfield repainted every June, the same chipped green for forty years.
“Okay,” I said.
Stuart nodded like I’d signed something.
He’s heard that word that way his whole life.
By Sunday afternoon Mario had moved into the big front bedroom.
Rhoda had thrown out my spice rack because the jars were “in a crazy order.”
And on Monday there was a sheet of graph paper on my fridge, held up by a magnet shaped like a cow.
WHO OWES WHAT.
Heat, $186. Cable, $94. Groceries, a number with a question mark after it.
Every line had EVIE printed next to it in Mario’s square capitals.
Next to his own name he’d written “between jobs.”
I nearly laughed into my coffee.
Mr. Berman had handed me that house in a green folder.
Nobody else’s name was in the folder.
Nobody else had paid a dollar toward the taxes.
But that week, the other names started coming in the mail.
A cable bill for Stuart.
A pharmacy letter for Rhoda, her birthday showing through the envelope window.
Then Mario’s absentee ballot, with my street number on it.
I held that one a long time.
You don’t get a ballot mailed to a place you’re visiting.
They weren’t staying with me.
They were putting their names on my address one envelope at a time, so one day it would look like it had been theirs all along.
So I made my own pile.
A date on everything.
Pictures of the chart, the suitcase, the cable bill.
A screenshot of the text Stuart sent our cousin: “we finally got the place.”
Then I took the green folder down off the closet shelf and read the will again, slow.
Page four. Her signature, shaky the way it got near the end.
And one line above it that I’d skimmed at the funeral home.
“The house is for EVELYN AND NO ONE ELSE, because I have watched her brothers for fifty years.”
I took a picture of page four and sent it to Mr. Berman, who’d told me at the reading to write everything down.
He answered in forty minutes.
“TRESPASSERS.”
That was the whole email.
I didn’t need more.
On the second Sunday, at two a.m., with all three of them asleep upstairs thinking I’d folded, I sat at the kitchen table and typed one page.
No yelling. Nothing about Mom. Nothing about being nine.
Anyone living in this house without my written permission had seventy-two hours to leave.
The locks would change on Thursday.
The little printer in the den ran it off, and I taped it right over Mario’s chart, cow and all.
Then I propped another envelope against the lamp on the little table by the door, Stuart’s name on it in my handwriting.
Upstairs, a board creaked.
A door clicked shut.
And then a zipper went all the way around a suitcase.
I smiled at the fridge.
Thursday I had the kettle on by seven, Mr. Berman’s card in my cardigan pocket.
At 8:20 a white van stopped at the curb.
A man got out carrying a red toolbox and a paper sack of brass cylinders.
Stuart came out onto the landing in his undershirt.
“Evie. WHO IS THAT?”
I didn’t answer him.
I turned the deadbolt, pulled the door wide, and stood back against the coat hooks.
Ninety-five dollars a door
The man with the red toolbox was the locksmith. I’d found his card in Mrs. Whitfield’s junk drawer on Monday and booked him for Thursday at eight. Ninety-five dollars a door, plus the cylinders.
He wiped his boots on the mat and looked past me at the stairs.
“Front and back?” he said.
“Front and back. And the one in the garage.”
He knelt and started backing the screws out of my deadbolt.
Stuart came down three steps into the hall. Rhoda was behind him in her quilted robe with her arms folded, the pharmacy letter’s birthday on her face.
Stuart had my envelope in his hand. He’d had it since Sunday. He’d read the notice and page four and said nothing about either one for four days. He’d just kept eating my eggs.
“You can’t do this,” he said. “We live here.”
“Front first,” I said to the locksmith.
“You got seventy-two hours off the internet, Evie. That’s not how it works. I looked it up.”
The locksmith kept turning his screwdriver. He’d done this before, in front of people in undershirts.
Rhoda went back up to the bedroom and came down with Stuart’s phone and put it in his hand.
He dialed the police and held the phone to his ear and looked right at me.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like to report an illegal lockout.”
Tuesdays
Every Tuesday for six years I picked Mrs. Whitfield up at eleven and drove her to dialysis, and every Tuesday she brought her notebook.
It was a blue spiral one from the drugstore. When it filled up she bought another just like it. She wrote down her weight going in and her weight going out. Her blood pressure. What the nurse said. Who’d come to the door that week, and what they wanted, and what time they left.
“If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen, Evelyn,” she said. She was the only one who called me Evelyn.
Her nephews had taken a checkbook off her kitchen counter once, years back. After that she wrote everything down, and she kept the notebook in the drawer of the little table by the door, with the pens that worked.
Her hands got too shaky for checks after the first year, so I wrote them out for her. The electric, the gas, the church. She’d sign underneath, slow. Six years of my handwriting on her bills.
One Tuesday in March, in the parking lot before her chair, she had the notebook open on her knee.
“When were you last over at Stuart’s?” she said.
“Easter, I think. Rhoda did a ham.”
She wrote that down. She didn’t say why. I didn’t ask, because the nurse was waving at us from the door.
Stuart never drove her once. Not to dialysis, not to the eye doctor, not to the cemetery on her husband’s birthday. But every Christmas a card came from all of us, in Rhoda’s big round hand. Love, Stuart, Rhoda, Mario and Evie. Rhoda did everybody’s cards. She dotted every i with a little circle.
Mrs. Whitfield kept those cards on her fridge until February, every year. “Your brother’s wife has nice penmanship,” she said once, and that was all she said.
At the funeral home Stuart did the second reading. He said she was family to us. People came up to shake his hand afterward.
I stood by the coffee urn, and Mr. Berman found me there and gave me the green folder and told me to write everything down. I thought he meant the furnace receipts.
All I wanted out of any of it was one room with a door that was mine. A cupboard by the sink where the mugs went where I put them.
Now Stuart stood in her front hall in his undershirt, giving the dispatcher my address like he’d known it his whole life.
Eleven minutes later a cruiser pulled up behind the locksmith’s van.
Officer Wang
The officer was maybe thirty. His name tag said WANG. He took his hat off just inside the door, which nobody else in my family had done in that house.
Stuart got to him first.
“We’ve lived here since the Saturday after Thanksgiving,” he said. “All of us. We get our mail here.”
He went to the little table and came back with the cable bill. Rhoda went to the kitchen and came back with the pharmacy letter. They’d been keeping them. They had them ready.
“She gave us seventy-two hours on a piece of printer paper,” Stuart said. “And there’s some line an old lady wrote in her will when she was on dialysis three days a week.”
Officer Wang looked at me.
“Ma’am, did you tell them they could stay?”
The locksmith stopped turning his screwdriver.
“I said okay,” I said.
“She said okay,” Stuart said. “Twice. In front of everybody.”
Officer Wang put his hat under his arm. He explained it the way you’d explain something to a woman my age, slow and kind, which made it worse. The house was mine. Nobody was arguing that. But once somebody’s been living somewhere with the owner’s okay, getting mail there, it’s a civil matter. I could change my locks. I had to give them a key. If I wanted them out, I’d have to file an eviction with the county and serve them, and if they fought it, I was looking at a month. Maybe more around the holidays.
“You can’t put people on the street in December on your own say-so,” he said. “Not in Wisconsin.”
Stuart put his hands in his back pockets.
I had Mario’s ballot in my pile upstairs, with my street number on it. I didn’t go get it. It would only have helped them.
I took out Mr. Berman’s card and asked Officer Wang to write his own number on the back, in case. He did. He told Stuart and Rhoda to keep it civil. He told me the same.
The locksmith finished the front lock and handed me a ring of new brass keys, two on it, and went out to the van for the back door cylinder.
I put the ring on the kitchen counter to sign his invoice.
Officer Wang said “Ma’am” at the door and went down the walk.
I closed the green door behind him and turned back to the counter.
The ring was gone, and Rhoda had her hand in her robe pocket.
Neenah
I went out to the garage, where it was thirty degrees and nobody followed me, and I called Mario.
He picked up on the fourth ring. There was a television on behind him, a game show.
“I’m at Fern’s,” he said. Fern was his ex-wife. She lived in Neenah and had never once liked him and had let him sleep on her couch anyway since Sunday. “The printer woke me. I came out on the landing and saw you taping it up.”
“So you packed.”
“I wasn’t going to fight you for a room, Evie.”
He’d fought me for rooms since he was four. I let that go.
“Stuart called the police,” I said. “The officer says it’s an eviction. A month.”
Mario didn’t say anything. The game show audience clapped.
“They’re not going back to Appleton for a month?” I said. “Rhoda can’t stand that long without her own kitchen.”
“There’s no Appleton.”
“What?”
“They closed on the Appleton house the Friday before Thanksgiving. Some couple from Green Bay with twins. I was in the basement till the movers came, I had nowhere either. Stuart told me not to say anything to you.”
I sat down on Mrs. Whitfield’s old cooler.
“Thanksgiving,” I said.
“There wasn’t any talk at Thanksgiving, Evie. It was already done. They had the garage code in October. Stuart got it out of Mom’s book while she was napping.”
“He sold his house before he moved into mine.”
“He said it was the family’s anyway. He said the old lady was confused at the end and nobody’d ever hold her to that will.” Mario stopped. “That first night, before you came. He went through her little table by the door. He took out some notebook. He said she wrote down every damn thing and he wasn’t leaving it lying around.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know. Rhoda bagged a bunch of stuff Tuesday. Your spices. Phone books. Stuff from the drawers.”
Through the little garage window I could see the blue cart at the end of the driveway, lid not shut all the way.
Mario said, “Evie. What day is garbage on that street?”
The blue cart
I went out the side door in my slippers.
The truck was two houses down. Its arm came out and grabbed the Pruszynskis’ cart and tipped it over its back and set it down empty.
I got my hands on my own cart’s handle and pulled it up the driveway backward. The wheels caught on the ice ridge from Monday. The driver leaned on his horn. I waved at him without looking.
Up by the garage I tipped it over on its side and pulled the bags out onto the concrete.
The first one was coffee grounds and the turkey carcass Rhoda had brought from somewhere.
The second one was my spice rack. All of it. The cumin, the bay leaves, the paprika I’d bought for the first meal I was going to cook in this house, still with the seal on. Mrs. Whitfield’s old phone books from 2009 and 2011. Rubber bands. Her pens, the ones that worked.
And three blue spiral notebooks, rubber-banded together, with a coffee ring on the top cover.
The truck went past behind me without stopping. The driver had given up on us.
I took the rubber band off. The top one was this year. I went back through her weights and her blood pressures and the Tuesdays, my name over and over, E. drove, until I got to March.
Her writing was shaky but it was hers.
Tues. Mar. 11. Stuart and wife came 2 pm, left 2:40. Brought a paper from a lawyer in Appleton. House to “the family,” Stuart to manage. Said Evelyn already agreed and signed. Evelyn’s name on the bottom line. Little circle over the i. Not her hand. I have had six years of her checks.
Then, under that, in a different pen:
Asked Evelyn today in the car. She has not been to Stuart’s since Easter. Did not sign. Called Berman Thursday. Changing page four.
I read it again. I was kneeling on the garage floor in my slippers, with paprika on my knee.
They hadn’t decided anything at Thanksgiving. They’d been working on this house since March, while she was still alive in it, with my name written on their paper in Rhoda’s round hand.
And the line on page four, the one I’d skimmed at the funeral home, was her answer to them.
The house door opened. Stuart came out onto the step in his undershirt with his phone, maybe to call the police again about the cart.
He saw the blue notebook in my hand.
He went back inside and shut her green door.
The kitchen table
I came in through the garage and put the notebook open on the kitchen table, March facing up. I put page four from the green folder next to it. Then I took my notice off the fridge, and Mario’s chart under it, and put the chart down too, cow magnet and all.
Stuart came in. Rhoda came in behind him, still in her robe.
Stuart didn’t sit. He looked at the table and he started talking, and he didn’t stop for a long time.
“She was on dialysis three days a week, Evie. She wrote down what color the sky was. You can’t take that to a judge. That paper was a standard family agreement, the lawyer said so. Nobody forced her to anything. She didn’t even sign it. So what are we talking about here? Nothing happened. You had a condo. You had a whole condo. And this was Mom’s best friend’s house, it was always going to come to the family, everybody knew that, Mom knew that. We sold because the timing was right on the market. That’s all. You want to make it into something.”
“Stuart,” Rhoda said.
“What.”
“Who signed my name?” I said.
He looked at the March page. Then he looked at Rhoda.
“I didn’t sign anything,” he said. “Rhoda does the cards.”
Rhoda put her hand flat on the counter.
“You told me she’d agreed,” she said. “You said Evie said fine, she always says fine, just put her name so we don’t have to drive out to her place.”
“Rhoda, don’t.”
“You said it standing right there in my kitchen.”
“I said she would’ve agreed. That’s different.”
Nobody said anything. The radio I didn’t own was still on low, polka.
“I’m filing Monday,” I said. “This goes in the file. Page four and the notebook. And I’m making a copy for Mom.”
That got him. He came around the table.
“You’d do that to Mom? She’s eighty-nine years old. Her best friend’s writing in there about her son? You show her that and you are done in this family, Evie. Done. Don’t bother coming Christmas. Don’t bother calling. I will tell her exactly what you did to us, and she’ll believe me, because she always has.”
He was right about that last part. I knew it, and he knew I knew it.
“Okay,” I said.
He stood there with his mouth a little open, like he’d been waiting for the other okay, the one I’d been giving him since I was nine.
Rhoda went first. She took her hand off the counter and went to the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Stuart said.
“To pack,” she said. “I’m not going in front of a judge for your agreement.”
“We have nowhere to go.”
“My sister has a basement in Fond du Lac,” Rhoda said. “You can sleep in it or not.”
She took the ring of new brass keys out of her robe pocket. Both keys landed on March.
Christmas Eve
They were gone by four that Thursday afternoon. Rhoda took her tree down herself and put the ornaments in egg cartons. She didn’t say a word to me the whole time she did it.
Stuart called Mom from the driveway before he’d even started the car.
So I never had to send the copy. Mom left me one message on Friday. “Your brother says you put him on the street in winter, Evelyn.” She’d never called me Evelyn in my life. She hasn’t called back. I’m not going to Fond du Lac for Christmas, and nobody’s asked me to.
The eviction filing fee was ninety-four dollars. Mr. Berman says I can drop it now. I haven’t dropped it.
On Christmas Eve I drove past the dialysis place on the way back from the store, out of habit, Tuesday or not.
When I pulled into the driveway, the porch light was off. So was every light in the kitchen.
I’d switched them off myself that morning.
There was still one dry pine needle in the carpet under the front window where Rhoda’s tree had stood. I left it.
A card had come from Neenah. Mario had signed it himself, in his square capitals. MERRY CHRISTMAS EVIE. DEB SAYS HI. SHE DOESN’T.
I put it on the fridge with the cow.
Then I slid the drawer of the little table by the door open, took out the blue notebook and one of her pens, and wrote Dec. 24. Nobody came.
I put the mugs back in the cupboard by the sink, one at a time.
If this one got to you, send it to the sister in your family who’s always the one saying okay.
For more family tension and old wounds, read “My Mother Has Kept A Page With My Name On It Since 1963” and “The Card At The Head Of My Son’s Board Table Just Said ‘Culhane'”. And for another family mystery with something valuable hidden in plain sight, try “My Husband Swore A Dead Man’s Motorcycle Was Gone. It Was Behind The Snowblowers.”
