“Let me understand this,” I said. “Dad left me something. Less than twenty-four hours later, you’re suggesting I hand it to Megan.”
She folded her hands in her lap and looked at the window. She said it would be simpler. She said Megan thought of it as a family asset. She said she was only trying to keep everyone together.
“No,” I told her. “You’re trying to keep Megan happy. That’s not the same thing.”
She flinched and then hardened, the way she did when she felt she had been challenged rather than heard, and told me she wouldn’t argue with me, that I should think about it, and left. The door closed behind her and I sat at my kitchen table with my hands shaking slightly from the effort of keeping my voice level, and I thought about my father, and what he had known about his daughters that the rest of us had spent thirty years refusing to say aloud.
The next week passed in the way weeks pass in the army when you are trying not to think about something: all surface and no depth. Training schedules, supply checks, meetings that required my body to be present and my mind to be somewhere manageable. But Megan’s face was there in the dark behind my eyes every night, and the silence I kept hearing was my mother’s.
A text arrived from Megan one evening. Just checking in. How’s life in your shack?
I deleted it and put the phone face-down on the couch.
When my mother called a few days later and I made the mistake of answering, she suggested, with the delicacy of someone trying to present a bad idea in the most palatable possible packaging, that Megan thought it would be good for me to spend some time at the cabin. To get some air. To clear my head. To give everyone space to breathe.
“She wants me out of the way,” I said, “and you’re helping her.”
My mother denied this without conviction. The conversation went in the circular direction those conversations always go, and eventually I heard myself say, in a voice that surprised me with its steadiness, that I would go. Not for Megan. For my father.
