Megan smiled when the lawyer read the will. That was the first thing I remember clearly after my father’s funeral. Not the flowers stacked on every surface of the dining room, not the casseroles lined up on the kitchen counter in foil covered pans brought by neighbors who believed grief could be cured with ground beef and cream of mushroom soup, not the rain tapping against the windows like nervous fingers, not the way my father’s house already smelled different without him in it, as though the building itself understood that the man who had maintained it for forty years was gone and had begun the slow process of forgetting his preferences.
Not any of that. Megan’s smile. It spread slowly across her face when Robert Chen, my father’s attorney, announced that she had inherited the Miami apartment.
The apartment had a view, a doorman, two bedrooms with floor to ceiling windows, and enough market value to make half the relatives sitting around that dining room table straighten in their chairs and recalculate their estimation of my sister’s importance. Megan received the news the way she received everything she believed she deserved, with a slight tilt of her chin and an expression that said of course, as though the universe had simply corrected an administrative delay. Then Robert turned the page.
And to my daughter Claire, he read, I leave the family cabin and the two hundred acres surrounding it in the Adirondacks. I did not move. I was still in uniform because I had flown straight from Fort Bragg to Albany and barely made it in time for the funeral.
My duffel bag sat against the wall near the door. My boots still had airport dust on them. I had not slept in thirty hours.
I had not eaten since a granola bar on the second flight. I sat at my dead father’s dining room table in my Army dress uniform while the rain streaked the windows and the house smelled like lilies and reheated coffee and the particular variety of grief that people try to feed you in aluminum pans. Across the table, Megan tilted her head.
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