Chapter 1: Half of Dad’s House
“It’s Dad’s house, Meg. Half of it’s mine. That’s just math.”
My brother said it from the bottom of my porch steps, with a rented U-Haul trailer hitched to his truck in my driveway and his pregnant girlfriend standing beside him holding a laundry basket full of throw pillows.
It was ten in the morning on a Sunday. I was still in my socks. I had a mug of coffee in one hand and the other hand on the screen door, and I remember thinking, very clearly, Don’t drop the mug.
“Travis,” I said. “What is this?”
“This is us moving in.” He spread his arms like a game-show host. “Kayla’s due in March. Our lease is up. And you’ve got four bedrooms in a house that belongs to both of us. You’ve been living here free for two years.”
Kayla gave me a small, nervous smile. She’s twenty-seven, with a high curly ponytail and a mint-green sweatshirt stretched over her stomach. I’d met her exactly once, at a Fourth of July cookout where Travis made her pay for her own hot dog.
“Hi, Meg,” she said. “I’m so sorry about all this. He said you’d be fine with it.”
“We’ll take the master,” Travis added. “Kayla needs the big tub. Her back’s killing her. You can have Dad’s old room. You liked that room.”
I had spent eleven months in Dad’s old room. Sleeping in a recliner next to his hospital bed, listening to him breathe. I didn’t like that room. I’d survived it.
“It’s not Dad’s house anymore,” I said.
“Oh, here we go.” Travis laughed and looked at Kayla like they’d made a bet. “She’s gonna tell me it’s complicated. Probate, lawyers, blah blah. Meg, it’s been two years. You don’t get to just keep it because you got here first.”
“That isn’t what I—”
“You know what Dad said to me? At Christmas, the year before he got sick?” He pointed up at the porch roof. “He said, This house will always be here for you, son. Always. Those were his words.”
Dad did say that. I was in the kitchen when he said it. That was in 2018, before the loan, before the tremor in his right hand, before the letters from the bank started arriving in envelopes with red windows.
Before Dad sat across from me at the kitchen table and made me promise.
Don’t tell your brother, Meggie. Whatever happens with the house. Let him remember it the way it was.
I’d kept that promise for three years. It had never once cost me anything until now.
“Travis,” I said carefully, “you need to unhitch that trailer and go home. We can talk this week. Not like this.”
“We don’t have a home. That’s what I’m telling you.” His voice climbed. A neighbor across the street, Mr. Brandt, had stopped rolling his trash can to the curb. “I gave notice on the apartment. We’re out on the first.”
“You gave notice,” I said, “on an apartment. Before asking me.”
“I don’t have to ask you! It’s half mine!”
Kayla’s chin started to wobble. She shifted the laundry basket against her hip, and I saw her wince and press a hand to her lower back. Something in me softened, and I hated that it did, because I knew exactly how Travis would use it.
“Kayla,” I said, “do you want to come in and sit down? Just you. For a minute.”
She looked at him.
“We’re not doing this in pieces,” Travis said. “We’re both coming in or nobody is.”
“Then nobody is,” I said, and I closed the screen door.
He stood there for another five minutes, yelling about Dad, about fairness, about how I’d always been the favorite. I didn’t answer. I sat at the kitchen table where Dad and I used to do his crossword, and I held my coffee with both hands, and I watched the trailer through the window.
Finally the truck doors slammed. The engine turned over.
I went to the front window to watch them leave, and that’s when I saw Kayla.
She was standing on my top step, alone, while Travis turned the truck around. She held up her phone, very close to my front door, and took a picture of the lock.
Then she took another one, closer.
