My sister called at half past six in the morning to tell me that our father had died in the night.
The trouble with this news was that our father was sitting three feet away from me at my kitchen table, wearing his navy blue robe, drinking my coffee, and reaching across to steal bacon off my plate.
For a few seconds I just stared at Vanessa’s name glowing on the screen. My older sister almost never called before noon. She was not a morning person and never had been, and she especially never called me before the sun was properly up unless she wanted something from me. So when the phone started buzzing and skittering across the table, my first thought was that there had to be an emergency of some kind. I had no idea the emergency was going to be one she had invented herself.
Vanessa and I had spent our whole lives at a slight angle to each other. We were not enemies, exactly, or at least I had never thought of us that way. We were two women who loved the same father and had never once agreed on what loving him was supposed to look like. She had stayed in our hometown, in the same county where we grew up, and she had built her entire sense of virtue out of that fact, out of geography, as if remaining within twenty miles of the house you were raised in were itself an accomplishment. I had moved away, and to her that settled the matter of which of us was the good daughter and which was the one who had abandoned the family. We did not fight about it often, because I had learned young that fighting with Vanessa was like arguing with the weather, but it sat under everything, a low current, for decades. That morning it finally surfaced all the way.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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