y key would not turn in my own mother’s front door, and before both my feet were even up on that porch, my brother Dewitt’s voice came through the wood and told me Mama had always meant this house for him.
One day. That is all the time that had passed since we stood over the ground at Crown Hill Cemetery in Sedalia, Missouri, and already somebody had fitted a brand new brass cylinder where her old skeleton key lock used to sit, still smelling of cut metal, still catching the morning sun the way nothing in that house had any business catching anything so ordinary, not yet, not one day after.
“Dewitt, open this door.”
My own voice came out shaking, and I hated that it shook, because I had spent fourteen months learning how to sound calm for a dying woman, and I had promised myself I would not lose that calm for anything less than her.
“I’m not trying to hurt you, Tandy,” he said, and that is the part that still sits crossways in my chest a year later, that he said it gentle, almost kind, the same voice he used to ask me to pass the green beans at Sunday dinner. “Mama and I talked about this a long time ago. She always meant the house to come to me. You’ve got your own place across town. I need this one.”
I stood on the porch my father built with his own two hands the summer I turned nine, holding a foil-covered casserole dish still half full of somebody’s funeral chicken and rice, and I listened to my brother explain to me, through a locked door, that our mother had a plan for her own house that she had never once mentioned to the daughter who learned to give her insulin shots at two in the morning, who drove the eleven miles into Bothwell Regional Health Center for a double shift and then drove straight back out to sit with her until the home health aide came at six.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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