My Sister Returned With Proof Against My Husband

Part 2 - The Story I Had Lived In

I turned the sign myself.

Not because Paul asked. Because a customer was walking toward the door and I couldn't arrange sympathy flowers while my own memories were being pulled apart.

“Start with the check,” I said.

Paul sat on the stool behind the counter. It was my stool, the one he said made my back worse. I noticed that absurd detail because I couldn't take in everything at once.

“Your mother offered to help with the garage.”

His repair shop. The business that failed the year Mom died.

“You told me she had no money left because Nora took it.”

“I owed more than I told you. I was trying to keep us afloat.”

“So you took a loan.”

“Yes.”

“And said my sister stole it.”

He looked at Nora.

“She had already left. You were furious with her before any of this happened.”

That part was true.

Nora had moved three states away shortly after Mom's diagnosis. There had been a job offer, a man, a chance she said she couldn't afford to miss. I had called her selfish on the phone. She had called me controlling. Neither of us had apologized.

For years, I had treated that argument as proof of everything that followed.

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked her.

“I tried to call the house. Paul answered. He said you wouldn't speak to me.”

“You could have come to the hospital.”

“I did.”

She described the entrance near the vending machines, the wet hem of her jeans, the bag with clean pajamas she had bought for Mom.

I knew those vending machines. I had spent that week living on their crackers.

“Paul came out and told me Mom had asked not to see me. Then he said you were having chest pains from the stress and I needed to stop making it worse.”

Paul stared at the floor.

“I was trying to keep things calm.”

“For whom?”

He didn't answer.

Nora had left the pajamas with him. She had waited in a motel until Saturday and called again. On Sunday she went home.

Mom died Monday morning.

“Why didn't you call me directly after?” I asked.

She held my eyes.

“I did. You answered.”

I remembered suddenly. Her voice, thin over the line. My hand clamped around the receiver.

You don't get to cry now. Don't call this house again.

I had hung up before she could say anything else.

Paul had lied. But my own voice had closed the door.

Nora wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand.

“I'm not telling you I did everything right. I was ashamed that I left. Then I was angry that you'd believe the worst without asking me. After a while, I didn't know how to come back without losing whatever dignity I had left.”

“Eighteen years,” I said.

“I know.”

Paul rose from the stool.

“We all made mistakes.”

I turned toward him.

“Sit down.”

He did.

“You weren't confused. You knew where the money went. You knew she came. You let me hate her for things you did.”

I asked Nora to give us a little time. She wrote her number on the envelope and said she would be staying at the Riverside Motel through Sunday.

This time, she would wait for my answer, not Paul's.

After she left, I watched him straighten the lunch bag and line up two sandwiches as though we could eat our way back into an ordinary Friday.

“Did you ever pay Mom back?”

He shook his head.

“Did she know I thought Nora took it?”

He paused too long.

“Paul.”

“She asked me why you wouldn't talk about your sister. I told her you were handling it in your own way.”

I remembered Mom reaching for my hand the night before she died.

Don't let this become forever, Claire.

I had thought she was asking me to forgive a thief.