Three weeks after we buried my parents, my mom’s brother dropped his duffel bag in our front hall and told me, “You’ve got till Sunday, then I’m changing the locks.” So I hauled twenty years of my life to the curb in garbage bags, and a long black car was idling at the bottom of the driveway with its back door swinging open.
That house was all I had left, and I was twenty with no plan.
In March a semi crossed the median while Mom and Dad were driving to their anniversary dinner.
One phone call, and I was on a plastic chair outside the ER at 4:40 a.m., holding vending machine pretzels I never opened.
A lawyer in Pueblo read the will in a room that smelled like carpet glue.
Everything went to Uncle Kenny.
Kenny, who’d called me “the leftover” at Thanksgiving when he thought the TV would cover it.
There wasn’t any money. It all went to Dad’s dialysis.
He showed up three days later with that duffel and a case of beer.
He didn’t take his jacket off.
“THIS IS MY HOUSE NOW. You’ve got till Sunday.”
I begged.
I said I’d pick up grocery store shifts, cover the water bill, cook, anything.
He kicked off his boots and dropped into Dad’s recliner like it had always been his.
“Can you scoot over? I can’t see the game.”
That was it.
So while he sat there with the volume cranked, I rolled my whole life into black garbage bags.
Mom’s sewing basket. Dad’s old work flannel. A cereal bowl with a chip in the rim, and I still couldn’t tell you why I took it.
Sunday morning I dragged the last bag down the porch steps, face soaking wet.
The long black car was sitting at the curb with the engine on.
Nobody on our street knew anybody with a car like that.
I was going to walk right past it.
Then the back door opened, and somebody said “Mikayla” like they’d been saying it my whole life.
I turned around and my knees nearly WENT OUT.
I KNEW that face.
“What are you DOING here?” I said. ⬇️
The back door
It was my grandmother.
Paulette Reilly. Mom’s mother. Seventy-two years old, in a gray wool hat and the same long camel coat she had on the last time she stood in that driveway, when I was nine and Mom told her to get off our property.
She had one hand on the door frame and the other on a cane I’d never seen before.
“You’re all wet,” she said. She meant my face.
I let go of the bag. It tipped over on the sidewalk and the sleeve of Dad’s flannel slid out of the knot.
A man in a black suit got out of the driver’s side and stood by the hood with his hands folded in front of him, like somebody had told him not to help unless he was asked.
“I don’t drive the highway anymore,” Grandma said. “My eyes. The service in town only had this one on a Sunday.” She looked at the car like it was a dress she’d been talked into. “I told Luis to park down the street. He doesn’t listen either.”
I didn’t say anything. I was trying to remember if I’d ever heard her voice on the phone. I hadn’t. She hadn’t spoken to Mom or to me once in eleven years.
“Why are you here?”
She looked past me at the house. The front window. The blue light of the TV moving on the curtain.
“Kenny called me last night,” she said. “He said you’d be packed by ten. He said you asked to come live with me.”
Mom’s sewing basket
I hadn’t asked anybody for anything except Kenny, and I’d asked him so hard I was ashamed of it.
The sewing basket was the first thing I packed, because it was the first thing I couldn’t stand to see sitting there. Wicker, with a lid hinge Mom had fixed with a green twist tie from a bread bag. She sewed at the kitchen table on Sunday nights with the radio on. Hems, buttons, my softball pants. Kenny’s work pants, for free, every time he brought them in a grocery sack and dropped them on the table like a tip.
“He’s my baby brother,” she’d say when Dad gave her the look. “Somebody has to.”
That was Kenny to most people. The baby brother. The one who fixed our gutter once in 2014 and talked about it at every holiday after. He brought beer to everything and hugged too long and called my dad “Bear” because Barry was too much work.
At Thanksgiving he’d had five of those beers when he leaned over to his girlfriend and said, “Stef’s leftover’s gonna be living here till she’s forty.” The Broncos were on. He thought the TV would cover it. Mom heard. She took his plate away before he was done with it and didn’t speak to him till Christmas.
That was the most I ever saw her stand up to him.
The fight with Grandma, I only half remember, because I was nine and I was on the stairs. It was Easter. Grandma said the house had been Grandpa’s, so Kenny should’ve had half. Mom said Grandpa left it to her because Kenny pawned his watch while he was dying. Grandma said Kenny was going through a hard time. Mom told her to get off the property.
That was it. Eleven years. Birthday cards with a twenty in them, which Mom made me write thank-you notes for and mailed without reading.
The bottom of the basket was where papers lived in our house. My birth certificate. Dad’s dialysis schedule, three days a week, in Mom’s handwriting. Coupons that were expired before I was in high school.
When I turned eighteen, Mom pulled a big manila envelope out from under all of it and slapped it on the table.
“This is still the one we did when you were born,” she said to Dad. “We need to take my brother off it.”
Dad said they’d do it after the next round of bills. There was always a next round of bills.
So when the lawyer in Pueblo, Claudette Guo, slid an envelope across the table to me after the reading and said, “Your copy, and a letter from me. Read it when you can,” I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d heard my uncle’s name and then I’d heard nothing, like somebody had put a pillow over the room. In the parking lot Kenny put his arm around me and said, “It’s mine now, kid. Don’t make it weird.”
I put the envelope in the bottom of the sewing basket, because that’s where papers went. The basket went into bag three.
The funeral was a week before that. Closed caskets. I sat in the front row and didn’t turn around much. But when the last hymn started, somebody in the back pew got up and left, and the door made that long hiss closing. All I saw was a coat and a hat.
Grandma was standing at the car with her cane, waiting for me to say something.
Her hat was gray wool. It was the hat from the last pew.
Monday at nine
“Give me a minute,” I said.
Julianna from across the street was out at her mailbox in her robe, even though there’s no mail on Sunday. She’d brought a tuna casserole the week of the funeral and stayed an hour.
“Honey,” she said, coming partway down her driveway. “Kenny explained everything. It’s for the best, you going to your grandma’s. He’s been so good about all this.”
“He told you that?”
“He told the whole block, sweetheart. At the mailboxes. He said you wanted a fresh start.”
I went up the porch steps and back in the house.
The front hall still had the duffel in it, unzipped, with his shirts spilling out on Mom’s rug. He’d been living out of it for four days like he was at a motel. The game was a pregame show. He had the remote on his stomach and a can on the arm of Dad’s chair, right where Dad used to rest his elbow with the tape from the fistula.
“You told Grandma I asked to live with her.”
He didn’t look away from the TV. “You want to sleep in your car? You don’t have a car.”
He was right. Dad’s truck went to the dialysis bills in October.
“I could stay in the basement. I’ll pay you six hundred a month. I already talked to the store. They’ll give me thirty-two hours.”
He laughed. It was a real laugh, the kind he did at Thanksgiving.
“Six hundred.” He pointed the remote at the kitchen. “Go look on the counter.”
There was a business card stuck under the fruit bowl, and a printed sheet with a picture of our house on it. Our house with the gutter he fixed. Daniela Moody, Realtor. Listing appointment Monday 9:00. There was a number on the sheet in the corner, circled twice in pen.
“She comes tomorrow at nine,” Kenny said. “Takes pictures. I don’t want your crap in the pictures, and I don’t want you standing there looking at her like a dog at the pound.”
“You said this was your house.”
“It is. That’s why I get to sell it.” He took a drink. “You think I want to live in Stef’s house? Smelling her candles? I want the check.”
I stood there in the kitchen doorway. I’d been about to offer to clean the gutters. That was the next thing on my list.
“Where’s your key?” he said.
“In one of the bags.”
It was in my jeans pocket. I could feel it, the little rubber cap Mom put on it so she could tell it from hers.
“Find it and leave it under the mat. And close the door, you’re letting the cold in.”
I went out. Before I got to the bottom step, I heard the deadbolt turn behind me.
The back seat
Luis had the heat on so high in the back of that car that the windows were fogging up.
I didn’t get in to go anywhere. I got in because it was thirty-four degrees and I’d been crying for an hour and I had nowhere to sit that wasn’t a garbage bag.
Grandma sat across from me on the long seat with her cane between her knees. The inside smelled like pine air freshener and her perfume, which I knew. I didn’t know I knew it until I smelled it.
“You left the funeral early,” I said.
“Kenny saw me. I didn’t want to make a scene at my own daughter’s funeral.” She pulled her gloves off one finger at a time. “So I made one in the parking lot by myself instead.”
“You always took his side.”
“I did. Thirty years.” She didn’t argue it. “Your mother was right about the watch. She was right about most of it. I just couldn’t stand for him to be the one nobody took the side of.”
Somebody’s sprinkler came on down the street, set to a timer for a summer that wasn’t here yet.
“So why’d you come?”
She folded the gloves on her knee.
“Thursday he called me for money,” she said. “Nine thousand dollars. Just till the house sells, he said. I said what house. He said Stef’s house, it’s mine, read the will. I said Mikayla must be getting something. He said there’s nothing, Ma, the dialysis took it all, she’s a grown woman.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“Four. I wired him four thousand on Friday.” She said it without looking at me. “Then last night he calls again and tells me you want to come live with me. That you’ll be ready by ten. And would I come get you, because it would be good for both of us.”
“That’s what he told Julianna, too.”
“Then he asked me if you’d read your copy.”
I didn’t know what she meant at first. I’d stopped thinking of it as a thing that existed.
“Of the will,” she said. “He wanted to know if you’d read it. I said how would I know, I haven’t talked to the girl since she was nine. He said if she brings it up, don’t get into it. Just get her in the car.”
She looked out the fogged window at the house.
“I know my son. He only asks a question twice when he’s scared of the answer.”
Page four
Bag three was the one with the drawstring that broke, so I’d tied it off in a knot I couldn’t undo. I tore it open on the sidewalk with my hands.
Dad’s flannel came out first. Then a stack of my yearbooks, a lamp, the chipped bowl rolled out onto the grass. The sewing basket was at the bottom, upside down, with the twist tie holding.
Luis had come around and was standing over me with an umbrella, even though it still wasn’t raining. I think he didn’t know what else to do with his hands.
The envelope was right where I put it, under the dialysis schedule.
I got back in the car and opened it on my lap.
Two things came out. A stapled packet, nine pages, Last Will of Stefanie Ann Hayes, and on top of it a letter on the lawyer’s paper, one page, folded in thirds.
I read the will first because I was afraid of the letter.
It was dated September 14, 2006. I was two months old. Mom’s signature on the last page was rounder than I ever saw it, like she’d been writing it slowly with a baby on her other arm.
Page one was names. Page two was Dad. Page three was something about debts and a funeral.
Page four had a heading that said ARTICLE FOUR, and Grandma leaned over and put her finger on it before I got there, like she’d read a lot of these, and I guess at her age she had.
I give my residence and the residue of my estate to my brother, Kenneth Reilly, as trustee, to hold in trust for my daughter, Mikayla, until she reaches the age of twenty-five, and then to distribute the trust property to her outright.
I read it three times. Then I read it out loud, because I didn’t trust my own eyes with it.
“As trustee,” Grandma said. “That’s not the same as his.”
“He said everything went to him.”
“Everything went to him to hold.” She tapped the page. “For you.”
My hands were shaking so hard the letter rattled when I unfolded it.
Dear Ms. Hayes, as I explained at the reading, you are the sole beneficiary of the trust under Article Four. Mr. Reilly, as trustee, has a legal duty to manage the house and any proceeds for your benefit alone. Any sale must be handled through this office. Please call me at your earliest convenience so we can discuss your rights.
At the bottom, under her signature, it said cc: Kenneth Reilly.
Dad’s recliner
The key went in the deadbolt like it always had. The rubber cap was warm from my pocket.
He heard it. He was halfway out of the chair when I came into the living room, and Grandma came in behind me slow, with the cane, one step at a time over the duffel.
I picked the remote up off the arm of Dad’s chair and turned off the game.
“What the hell, Mikayla. Give me that.” He saw Grandma and stopped. “Ma? What are you doing in here? I told you to wait in the car.”
I held up the letter so he could see the lawyer’s name at the top.
He looked at it for maybe two seconds.
“Okay. Okay. So you read it.” He sat back down on the edge of the recliner. “That’s a piece of paper Stef wrote when you were in diapers and I was twenty-four and nobody else would do it. Bear’s brother was in prison. Ma wasn’t talking to her. I was the only one. You know that? I was the only one she had.”
“It says for my benefit.”
“Trustee means I’m in charge.” He was getting louder. “It means I decide. I can sell this place tomorrow if I want, that’s what it says, and you know why I’d sell it? Because you can’t keep it. You know what the taxes are on this house? Thirty-one hundred a year. Insurance. The furnace is twenty years old. You gonna pay for a furnace with grocery store money? I’m doing you a favor. I’m the only one in this family who ever did anything for you.”
“You put a sale sheet on the counter,” Grandma said.
“Stay out of it, Ma.”
“You told me there was nothing for her. You took four thousand dollars off me on Friday.”
“It’s a loan. I said it was a loan.” He turned on her. “And you, you didn’t even come to the funeral for her. You couldn’t come for Stef. But you’ll hire a limo for the leftover?”
Nobody said anything.
“I came,” Grandma said. “You saw me.”
He stood up then. He’s not a big man, Kenny, but he stood like he was.
“Fine. Call your lawyer. Call whoever you want. I’m still the trustee. Every bill on this house comes to me, and I’m not paying a single one of them. Let’s see how long you last.”
I went in the kitchen and took Daniela Moody’s card out from under the fruit bowl and put it in my pocket with the key.
“Don’t you call her,” he said.
“Claudette’s office is going to call her tomorrow,” I said. “Before nine.”
That was the third thing I said to him.
He went in the front hall and stuffed the shirts back in the duffel without folding them. He got the case of beer out of the fridge, what was left. Then he came back in the living room and grabbed Dad’s recliner by the arms and walked it backwards across the carpet toward the front door.
“That’s Dad’s,” I said.
“It was in the house. Everything in the house went to me.” He got it through the door sideways and bumped it down the porch steps one at a time, past my bags on the sidewalk, and heaved it into the bed of his truck.
Julianna was still at her mailbox.
He came back up the steps one last time and stood in the doorway.
“Don’t call me, Ma,” he said. “I mean it. Don’t you ever call me again.”
Then he got in his truck and drove off with Dad’s chair in the back.
Trash night
In May a judge took him off the trust, and Claudette’s office holds it now, till I’m twenty-five. I pay the water bill. I work thirty-two hours at the store and the taxes come out of what’s left in the trust, which isn’t much. The furnace is still twenty years old.
Grandma never got her four thousand back. She says she paid it to find out.
There are four little dents in the carpet in the living room where the recliner used to sit. I haven’t moved anything onto them.
Sunday nights are trash night on our street. Last week I dragged one bag down the porch steps to the curb, a regular one, the kitchen kind.
The long black car was sitting at the bottom of the driveway with the engine on. The service in town still only has that one on Sundays, and nobody on the block asks about it anymore. Julianna waves.
The back door opened.
“Did you eat?” Grandma said.
I set the bag down and went to help her out.
If somebody in your family stopped calling a long time ago, maybe this is the week you pick up when they do, and pass this along to somebody who’s still waiting on that call.
Family tensions can turn an ordinary gathering into a standoff, as in “My Son Brought Two Men and a Pen to Sunday Dinner” and “My Grandpa Heard That Man’s Voice on His Kitchen Radio for Forty Years”. For another unsettling encounter with a stranger, read “A Stranger Called Me Half a Person on My Train to Fargo”.
