My Parents Let My Sister Move Into My Apartment Without Asking

The Vanilla Candle

The first thing I noticed when I opened my apartment door that Thursday was the smell. It hit me before I even got the key out of the lock, a thick, sweet wall of vanilla so strong it made my eyes

water. My apartment had never smelled like vanilla in the two years I’d lived there. It smelled like coffee in the morning and like whatever I’d burned for dinner at night, and the rest of the time it didn’t smell like much of anything, which was exactly the way I liked it.

The second thing I noticed was that my couch was gone.

I stood in the doorway with my laptop bag still on my shoulder and stared at the space where it should have been. My couch was a charcoal gray sectional, the first real piece of furniture I’d ever

bought for myself, and it had lived against the long wall under the window for two years. In its place sat a dining table I had never seen before in my life. It was dark walnut with carved legs and six matching chairs, the kind of table you see in a furniture showroom with a bowl of fake lemons in the

middle of it.

My bookshelf was missing too. In the corner where it used to stand, there was a lamp with a pink fabric shade, the kind with little tassels hanging off the bottom, and three cardboard boxes stacked

beside it. The top box had JOLENE, KITCHEN written across it in purple marker. On the dining table, right in the middle, a vanilla candle in a glass jar was burning, its little flame flickering in the draft from the open door.

I set my bag down very slowly on the floor. Then I took out my phone and called my father.

He answered on the third ring, and he sounded almost cheerful, the way he sounds when the Browns win on a Sunday. I could hear the television going behind him, and the clink of my mother

doing dishes in their kitchen.

“Matty! What’s up, bud?”

“Dad,” I said. “Where is my couch?”

There was a short pause. Then he laughed, easy, like I’d asked him where he put the TV remote.

“Oh, right. Your sister needed to store a few things. I let her use your place. No big deal.”

“No big deal?” I looked around the living room. “Dad, you moved all my furniture. There’s a dining

table in here. There’s a pink lamp.”

“Your sister is going through a hard time, Matt,” he said, and his voice changed a little, the way it always changes when Jolene’s name comes up, softer and more careful. “She’s moving back in with

us, and there’s no room in the garage. You’ve got all that space.”

I asked again, because he hadn’t answered me. “Where is my couch?”

There was another pause, longer this time.

“I think the maintenance guys took it to the dumpster area,” he said.

Chapter Two: The Rain

My name is Matt Reinholt. I’m twenty-eight years old, and until that Thursday, I thought the spare key

I’d given my father was for emergencies. I’d handed it to him the day I signed my lease, in the parking lot of this building, and I’d said exactly that. For emergencies. A burst pipe while I was at work. A lost key. A fire. Anything that actually required somebody to enter my home when I wasn’t there.

Apparently, my sister needing somewhere to put a dining set qualified.

I had just come home from a long day at work. I’m a network administrator for a medical supply company on the north side of Columbus, Ohio, and that Thursday a router had failed in our

distribution center at six in the morning and taken down the whole warehouse. I’d spent eleven hours on the floor of a server closet with a laptop on my knees and a flashlight in my teeth. All I wanted when I got home was the leftover pasta in my refrigerator, an episode of something stupid

on my television, and my couch. The eleven-hundred-dollar sectional I had spent three weekends picking out.

I ended the call with my father without saying goodbye. I stood there in my living room for a minute,

looking at the walnut table and the pink lamp and the boxes with my sister’s name on them. Then I turned around and walked back out the door and down the stairs and around the side of the building to the dumpsters.

It was raining. Not hard, but steady and cold, the kind of late October rain that soaks through your jacket in about two minutes. The dumpster area is behind a wooden fence at the back of the parking lot, next to the recycling bins, and the light over it was buzzing and flickering.

My couch stood beside a pile of black garbage bags and a broken wooden pallet. Somebody had dragged it out there and left it on the wet asphalt with its back against the fence. One of the cushions had fallen off and was lying face down in a puddle. The gray fabric had turned almost black

where it had soaked up the water.

I stood there in the rain and looked at it. I remembered measuring my living room twice before I bought it, with a tape measure borrowed from Trent, to make sure it would fit under the window. I

remembered the three weekends I spent going to furniture stores. I remembered putting it together myself on a Sunday afternoon to save the eighty-dollar delivery setup fee, and the bruise I got on my thumb from the Allen wrench.

Now water was soaking into the cushions while my sister’s dining table sat dry inside my home.

I picked up the cushion out of the puddle. Water ran out of it onto my shoes. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just stood there holding it, and then I set it back on the couch where it belonged, and

I took out my phone again and called my mother.

She answered on the first ring. She must have been sitting right next to Dad when I hung up on him.

“Matthew, your sister is having a difficult time,” she said, before I could even get a word out.

“Mom, they threw away my couch.”

“Your father said it was old.”

“It was two years old. I bought it new. It’s sitting in the rain by the dumpster.”

She sighed, the long sigh she’s been sighing at me my whole life, the one that means I’m making a fuss about nothing. “Well, Jolene needs this more than you need an empty living room,” she said. “You’re single. You don’t even use half your space.”

I looked through the gap in the wooden fence, up at my own apartment window on the second floor. I could see the pink lamp glowing through the blinds.

“She has nice things,” Mom continued. “That table was very expensive. You should be grateful she’s

letting you hold on to them.”

Grateful. I stood there in the rain with my ruined couch beside me and turned that word over in my mind. Nobody had asked me. Nobody had warned me. Nobody had even given me the chance to

move my own belongings out of the way. The decision had been made at my parents’ kitchen table, probably days ago, and now both of them were treating my objection like it was the real problem.

My father had walked into my home with an emergency key. My property was sitting in a puddle. And

I was supposed to thank my sister.

“I have to go, Mom,” I said, and I hung up before I said something I couldn’t take back.

Chapter Three: Smaller Portions

My sister Jolene is thirty-one, three years older than me. My parents have spent our whole lives treating her needs as emergencies and mine as inconveniences, and I’d stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a dripping faucet. It was just the background sound of our family.

She got the bigger bedroom growing up, the one with two windows facing the backyard. When she was fourteen she asked for a vanity mirror with lights around it like a movie star’s dressing room, and Dad drove to Lowe’s that same Saturday and spent the whole weekend installing it. When I was

fourteen I asked for a desk so I’d have somewhere to do my homework that wasn’t the kitchen table. Mom told me the kitchen table would build character.

When Jolene graduated from high school, my parents threw a party in the backyard with a white tent

and a DJ and forty guests and a sheet cake with her picture printed on it in frosting. When I graduated three years later with better grades and an academic award, we went to the Olive Garden. Just the four of us. Jolene spent most of the dinner on her phone, and Dad asked for the check

before dessert.

She went to a private college in Pennsylvania on my parents’ credit card. She changed her major four times, from nursing to communications to interior design to something called lifestyle marketing, and

she graduated in six years with forty thousand dollars in loans my parents are still paying. After that, she stumbled from job to job and boyfriend to boyfriend, and every single time something fell apart, my parents caught her. New car when the old one broke down. Rent money when a roommate left. A

month at home whenever she needed it.

I moved out at nineteen. I didn’t ask them for anything, because I’d learned by then that there wasn’t anything left over for me to ask for. I worked two jobs through community college, nights at a Kroger

stocking shelves and weekends at a computer repair shop on High Street. I earned my associate’s degree in network technology in three years instead of two because I was working full time. I got my certifications on my own dime. I found steady work, and then better work, and two years ago I got

the job I have now, as a network administrator, with a salary and benefits and a 401(k).

I paid for my apartment. Every single rent payment, eleven hundred and fifty dollars a month, on time. Every piece of furniture. Every dish in the cabinets. Every inch of that space was mine.

Jolene had recently lost another job, at a boutique in Short North, and broken up with her boyfriend, Derek, who she’d been living with for two years in an apartment in Dublin. I knew she was moving back in with our parents. Mom had mentioned it on the phone the week before, in passing, the way

you mention the weather.

I did not know they had decided my living room was her storage unit.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my bed in my bedroom, which they hadn’t touched, and stared at

the ceiling. The vanilla candle was still burning out there on a table that wasn’t mine, filling the whole apartment with that sweet smell. Around midnight, I got up and blew it out and threw it in the trash, jar and all.

Then I stood in the dark in my living room, among my sister’s furniture, and thought about every time in my life I’d been expected to give something up because Jolene wanted it. The smaller portion at dinner. The cheaper Christmas present. The bedroom with one window. The achievement nobody

celebrated because Jolene was having a hard week. The graduation at the Olive Garden.

And now the couch.

I’d spent twenty-eight years making room for my sister. I’d done it without being asked, because that

was what was expected of the strong one, the easy one, the one who never needed anything. And standing there in the dark, I realized that if I made room this time, I would be making room for the rest of my life.

By morning, I knew what had to change.

Chapter Four: Four Thousand Two Hundred

I went to work Friday because I didn’t know what else to do. I sat at my desk and stared at my

monitors and answered tickets and reset passwords, and the whole time I kept thinking about that couch sitting in the rain.

At lunch, I walked across the street to my bank, a branch of Huntington on Morse Road. I went up to

the teller window and asked to withdraw four thousand two hundred dollars from my savings account. In cash.

The teller, a young woman with a nose ring and a name tag that said BRIANNA, looked at me for a

second. She asked if everything was all right. Banks are supposed to ask, she said, when somebody takes out a big amount of cash all at once, in case somebody is being scammed.

“Nobody’s scamming me,” I said. “I’m just finally paying for something I should have paid for a long

time ago.”

She counted it out in hundred-dollar bills. Forty-two of them. She put them in a white envelope and slid it across the counter to me. I looked at the balance on the receipt she gave me. It had taken me

two years to save the money in that account. Two years of making coffee at home and not going on vacation and driving a ten-year-old Honda. I watched the number drop in a single second, and it hurt more than I expected.

I left work early. I told my boss I had a family emergency, which was true. I drove straight to the leasing office of my apartment complex, a little brick building at the front of the property with a fountain that never works.

The property manager looked up when I walked in. Her name is Carla, a woman about fifty with reading glasses on a chain and a coffee mug that said I Survived Another Monday. She’d been nice to me for two years. She knew my name and always asked about my job.

“Matt,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“I need to break my lease,” I said.

She frowned. She pulled my file up on her computer and peered at it over her glasses. “You’ve still got

seven months left,” she said. “Through May. You know that, right?”

“I know. What’s the penalty?”

She looked at the screen for a moment. “Two months’ rent,” she said. “That’s twenty-three hundred.

Plus the early termination fee in your lease agreement, which is nineteen hundred. Four thousand two hundred dollars total.” She looked up at me. “And you’d have thirty days to vacate.”

It hurt to hear the number out loud, even though I already knew it. I’d read my lease the night before at two in the morning, every page of it, looking for exactly that clause.

“Can I pay it now?” I asked.

She blinked at me. “Right now?”

“Cash,” I said. I took the envelope out of my jacket pocket and placed it on the counter in front of her.

Carla looked at the envelope. Then she looked at me. She didn’t touch it right away.

“Matt,” she said quietly. “Is this about the furniture? Our maintenance guy told me your dad came by on Tuesday with a moving truck. He said your dad told him to haul your couch out to the dumpster. I

thought it was strange.”

I didn’t say anything for a second. “Yes,” I said finally. “It’s about the furniture.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded and opened the envelope and counted the money,

twice, the way I’d counted it at the bank. She processed the paperwork. She printed out a termination agreement, four pages, and I signed it on every line. She gave me a copy in a manila folder. I had thirty days to vacate. After that, the unit would go back to the management company,

and anything left inside would be considered abandoned property and handled according to the terms of the lease.

“I’m sorry, Matt,” she said, as she handed me the folder. “You were one of my good ones.”

I drove back to the apartment and started packing.

Not Jolene’s things. Mine.

I took my clothes out of the closet and the dresser and put them in garbage bags because I didn’t

have boxes. I took my books out of the box Dad had shoved them into when he moved my bookshelf, and I found the bookshelf itself out on the balcony, wet from the rain. I took my television and my computer and my monitors and the router I’d configured myself. I took my pots and pans and my

coffee maker and my one good knife. I took my towels and my sheets and my shower curtain and my toothbrush.

My friend Trent came over at six with his pickup truck. Trent and I have known each other since eighth

grade, and he’s a lineman for the electric company now, with forearms like tree branches and a laugh you can hear from across a parking lot. I’d texted him at noon. All I said was that I needed help moving that night and could I crash on his couch for a while. He texted back one word. Coming.

He didn’t demand an explanation before helping me. He walked in the door, took one look at the walnut dining table and the pink lamp, smelled the vanilla, and said, “Your sister?” And I said yes. And he just nodded and picked up my television.

We made three trips to his house in Clintonville, about fifteen minutes away. We hauled my wet couch out of the dumpster area too, and Trent said he knew a guy who could maybe clean the cushions. By nine o’clock that evening, my apartment held my sister’s dining set, her dresser, her pink

lamp, her cardboard boxes, and almost nothing that belonged to me.

I stood in the doorway one last time and looked at it. Then I left my keys on the kitchen counter, next to a copy of the lease termination agreement, and I closed the door behind me.

I didn’t call Dad. I didn’t call Mom. I didn’t call Jolene.

Chapter Five: Saturday

Saturday morning, I was eating cereal on Trent’s couch in my pajamas when my phone lit up.

It was sitting on the coffee table next to my bowl, and the screen said Dad. I watched it ring. I didn’t pick it up. A minute later, it said Mom. I didn’t pick that one up either. Then Jolene.

I let them all ring. Trent came out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee and looked at the phone

buzzing on the table and then at me.

“You going to answer that?” he asked.

“Eventually,” I said.

At ten, the texts started.

The first one was from Dad. Your sister went to drop off more stuff and the apartment is empty. What’s going on? Then another one, two minutes later. Matt. Call me. Then another. This isn’t funny.

Mom wanted to know where my furniture had gone. She sent three texts in a row, each one longer than the last, the third one ending with a line that said she didn’t understand why I always had to make everything so difficult.

Then Jolene’s message appeared. Where am I supposed to put my things? Matt, this isn’t funny.

I turned the phone face down on the coffee table. It rang again. And again. Trent sat down in the recliner across from me with his coffee and watched it buzz itself in a little circle on the table.

When Jolene called for the fourth time, I finally picked up.

Her first words came fast, the way they always do when she’s upset, tumbling out on top of each other. “The leasing office said you broke your lease. Are you out of your mind? Do you know how

much that costs? Dad said you just walked out and left everything. I came over with my last load and the lady in the office said the unit’s being vacated and I have to get my stuff out by the twentieth or they’ll throw it out. Matt, where am I supposed to put a dining table?”

I held the phone to my ear and waited for her to stop talking.

Then I answered.

“Jolene,” I said, very calmly. “Your things are exactly where Dad put them. The keys are with Carla in the

leasing office. The unit’s mine for twenty-nine more days, and I’m giving you every one of them. After that, it goes back to the management company. Whatever’s in there on November twentieth, they’ll treat as abandoned.”

She was quiet for a second. I’d never heard Jolene quiet before.

“My couch was out by the dumpster,” I said. “In the rain. One of the cushions was in a puddle. Dad told the maintenance guy to haul it out there so there’d be room for your table. Nobody asked me.

Nobody called. I came home from an eleven-hour shift and my living room smelled like a candle store and my couch was in the trash.”

Silence on the line.

“I’m not angry at you,” I said. “Not exactly. I’m just done being the place everybody puts things when they don’t know what else to do with them.”

When she finally spoke, her voice was different. Smaller.

“Matt,” she said. “Dad told me you said it was okay.”

Chapter Six: What Jolene Didn’t Know

She came to Trent’s house that afternoon. I didn’t invite her. She asked if she could, and I said yes,

and an hour later her little white Kia pulled up in front of Trent’s place in Clintonville and she sat in it for a long time before she got out.

She looked terrible. That was the first thing I noticed when I opened the door. My sister has always

been the pretty one, the one with the shiny hair and the perfect makeup, the one who never left the house without looking like she was going somewhere. That afternoon she was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie with the hood pulled up, and no makeup, and her eyes were swollen like she hadn’t

slept.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

Trent made himself scarce. He said he had to run to the hardware store, which I knew he didn’t, and

he left the two of us alone in his living room. Jolene sat down on the very edge of his couch like she was afraid it might bite her. I sat in the recliner.

“I didn’t know about the couch,” she said. “I swear to God, Matt. I didn’t know.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Dad called me last week,” she said. “After Derek and I broke up. He said he’d talked to you and you

said I could keep some of my stuff at your place for a couple of months. He said you were fine with it. He said you offered.” She shook her head. “I thought it was weird. You and I haven’t really talked since Christmas. But he said you offered, and I believed him, because I wanted to.”

“I didn’t offer,” I said. “He never called me. The first I heard about it was Thursday night when I opened my door.”

She put her face in her hands. “He told me he’d handle it,” she said through her fingers. “He said, I’ll

handle everything, Jojo, don’t you worry about it. He was there with the truck on Tuesday. I wasn’t even there. I was at work.” She looked up. “I didn’t know he put your couch in the dumpster. I didn’t know he put your bookshelf on the balcony. I didn’t know any of it until the leasing lady told me this

morning.”

I believed her. That was the strange part. I’d spent my whole life being angry at my sister, quietly, in the background, for always getting the bigger room and the bigger party and the bigger everything.

But sitting there in Trent’s living room, looking at her swollen eyes and her pulled-up hood, I believed her.

“Why couldn’t your stuff just go to Mom and Dad’s?” I asked. “The garage. The basement. Anywhere.”

Jolene was quiet for a long time. She pulled at a loose thread on the sleeve of her hoodie.

“Because Derek knows where Mom and Dad live,” she said.

Something in the way she said it made the back of my neck go cold.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. When she finally did, she was looking at the floor.

“We didn’t break up, Matt,” she said. “Not the way Mom tells it. I left. In the middle of the night, two weeks ago, while he was out with his friends. I packed what I could fit in my car and I went to a hotel

by the airport.” She swallowed. “He took money out of our joint account. All of it. Eleven thousand dollars. He changed the locks on our apartment the next day so I couldn’t get the rest of my things. He’s been calling me thirty times a day. He showed up at the boutique, at my job, and screamed at me

in front of customers. That’s why they let me go.”

I stared at her.

“I went to the courthouse on Tuesday,” she said. “Franklin County. I filed for a civil protection order.

The hearing’s next week.” Her voice was shaking now. “But he knows where Mom and Dad live. He’s been to their house a hundred times. He knows the garage code. If my stuff was there, he’d know I was there. He’d know where to find me.”

“And he doesn’t know where I live,” I said slowly.

“He’s never been to your apartment,” Jolene said. “Not once. He doesn’t even know your last name is different from mine. You know, because I go by Reinholt-Shaw now.” She laughed, a broken little

sound. “That’s why I told Dad yes when he said your place. It was the one place Derek would never look.”

Chapter Seven: The Key

I drove to my parents’ house that evening.

They live in Westerville, in the same split-level I grew up in, with the basketball hoop still bolted over the garage and the maple tree in the front yard that Jolene and I used to climb. Dad’s truck was in the

driveway. The kitchen light was on. I sat in my car at the curb for a while before I went up and rang the bell.

Mom answered the door. She took one look at me and her face went tight, the way it does when

she’s getting ready for an argument.

“Well,” she said. “Look who finally decided to show up.”

“Is Dad here?”

“He’s in the kitchen. Matthew, I want you to know that what you did was incredibly childish. Four thousand dollars. To prove a point. Your sister was in tears this morning.”

I walked past her into the kitchen. Dad was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and the

newspaper, the same chair he’s sat in my whole life. He looked up when I came in, and I saw something cross his face. Not anger. Something closer to guilt.

“Matty,” he said.

“Dad,” I said. “I need my key back.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached into the pocket of his flannel shirt and took out his keyring and worked my apartment key off of it, slowly, and set it on the kitchen table between

us. He didn’t push it across. He just set it down.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” he said.

“You didn’t think I’d mind that you walked into my home without asking, moved everything I own,

and threw my couch in the trash?”

“It was in the way,” he said. “Your sister needed the space. I figured you’d understand. You always understand.”

“You told Jolene I offered.”

He looked down at his coffee.

“You told her you’d talked to me,” I said. “You told her I said yes. You never called me, Dad. Not once.”

Mom had come into the kitchen behind me. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. “Your father was trying to help,” she said. “Your sister’s going through something very difficult, Matthew. You don’t know the half of it.”

“I know about Derek,” I said.

The kitchen went quiet. Mom’s arms came uncrossed. Dad set down his coffee cup.

“She told me this afternoon,” I said. “The money. The locks. The protective order.” I looked at my

father. “You knew. Both of you. And you didn’t think I needed to know that before you hid her things in my apartment?”

Dad didn’t say anything for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough.

“She asked us not to tell anybody,” he said. “She was ashamed. She didn’t want you to know.”

“So you decided for me,” I said. “Again. Like always. You decided what I could handle and what I couldn’t. You decided I’d be fine. Because I’m always fine.” My voice was shaking now, and I couldn’t

stop it. “Dad, if you had called me and said, Jolene’s in trouble, she needs somewhere safe to put her things where her ex can’t find them, I would have said yes before you finished the sentence. I would have helped you carry the table. I’d have moved my couch myself.”

He closed his eyes.

“You didn’t have to throw it in the rain,” I said. “You just had to ask.”

Chapter Eight: The Kitchen Table

We sat down at the kitchen table, the three of us, the same table where I did my homework every night for twelve years because I didn’t have a desk. Mom made a pot of coffee nobody drank. Dad sat with his hands folded on the table in front of him, staring at my apartment key.

“I want to tell you something,” he said finally. “And I don’t want you to say anything until I’m done.”

I waited.

“When Jolene was six,” he said, “she got sick. You were three. You don’t remember it.” He swallowed.

“Leukemia. Acute lymphoblastic. She was at Nationwide Children’s for most of a year. Chemo. Bone marrow tests. Your mother slept in a chair by her bed for four months.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d known Jolene was sick when she was little. It was one of those things that

was mentioned once in a while at family gatherings, in a lowered voice, and then everybody changed the subject. I’d never known it was leukemia. I’d never known it was a year.

“She got better,” Dad said. “Thank God. They said she was cured by the time she was nine.” He looked

down at the table. “But your mother and I never stopped being afraid. Not once. Every time she cried, every time she was sad, every time something went wrong, we’d look at her and see that little girl in the hospital bed with no hair. And we’d do anything to make it stop.”

Mom had her hand over her mouth.

“And you,” Dad said. He looked up at me. “You were three. And your grandma took care of you that whole year while we were at the hospital. And when we came home, you were this little boy who

didn’t need anything. You fed yourself. You dressed yourself. You never cried.” His voice broke. “And we were so tired, Matty. We were so tired and so scared, and here was this one kid who was fine. So we let you be fine. We let you be fine for twenty-five years.”

I stared at the table. My eyes were burning.

“I didn’t call you about the apartment,” he said, “because I didn’t want to hear you say no. I didn’t think you would. But I didn’t want to risk it. I just wanted to fix it for her. And I knew you’d be okay. You’re always okay.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “That’s what I told myself when I

told the maintenance man to haul your couch away. Matt’ll be okay. Matt can buy another couch.”

“And the desk?” I said. My voice came out small. “When I was fourteen. When I asked for a desk.”

Mom made a sound. She got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen. I heard her go down

the hall, and I heard a door open, and a minute later she came back carrying something. A photograph, in a frame. She set it on the table in front of me.

It was a picture of a desk. A cheap white particleboard desk, the kind you buy at Target and put

together yourself, sitting in the corner of a bedroom with a lamp on it and a pencil cup.

“We bought it,” Mom said quietly. “For your fourteenth birthday. It was in the trunk of the car.” She sat back down. “And then Jolene’s boyfriend broke up with her that week, and she was so upset, and

she said she wanted a vanity for her room so she’d feel better about herself. And your father and I were so afraid she’d stop eating again, like she did after the treatment. So we took the desk back to Target and exchanged it for the mirror.”

I couldn’t speak.

“I took that picture before we returned it,” she said. “I don’t know why. I think I wanted to remember what we did. I’ve kept it in my dresser drawer for fourteen years.” She was crying now. “Every time I see it, I think about you at this table, every night, doing your homework. And I told you it would

build character.” She shook her head. “It didn’t build character, Matthew. It just taught you not to ask.”

Chapter Nine: Thirty Days

Jolene’s hearing for the civil protection order was the next Thursday, at the Franklin County Domestic Relations Court downtown. I went with her. So did Mom and Dad. We sat in the hallway outside the courtroom on a hard wooden bench for two hours, the four of us, not saying much.

Derek didn’t show up. His lawyer did, a tired man in a wrinkled suit, and he argued for a while, but Jolene had brought printouts of every text and voicemail. Three hundred and twelve of them, in two weeks. The judge read through a stack of them with her reading glasses on and then took them off

and looked at Derek’s lawyer for a long time. She granted the order for five years.

In the parking lot afterward, Jolene stood next to her car and shook. Mom held her. Dad stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking lost. And I did something I hadn’t done since we were kids. I

walked over and put my arms around my sister.

“Thank you,” she said into my shoulder. “For coming.”

“That’s what you do,” I said. “You show up.”

We had nineteen days left on my apartment. We spent most of them moving Jolene’s things.

Dad found a storage unit on Schrock Road, a climate-controlled ten-by-fifteen, eighty-nine dollars a month. Jolene didn’t have eighty-nine dollars. I paid the first three months on my credit card at the

counter, and Dad tried to stop me, and I told him to let me, because it was the first time in my life anybody in my family had let me help instead of just expecting me to. Then we hauled everything out of my apartment and over to the unit in two trips with a rented U-Haul. The walnut dining table. The

six chairs. The dresser. The pink lamp. The boxes that said JOLENE, KITCHEN in purple marker.

On the last trip, carrying the dining table down the stairs, Jolene stopped on the landing and set her end down.

“This was Grandma Evelyn’s,” she said. “Did you know that? She left it to me. In her will.”

I didn’t know that. Grandma Evelyn was the one who took care of me the year Jolene was sick. She died when I was sixteen.

“I always felt bad about it,” Jolene said. “That she left it to me and not you. You were the one she raised.” She ran her hand along the carved edge of the tabletop. “She used to tell me you sat under this table every day that year. With your toy trucks. While she made dinner. Just waiting for Mom and

Dad to come home.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t remember it. I wished I did.

“When I get my own place,” Jolene said, “I want you to have this. It should’ve been yours.”

“Jolene.”

“I mean it,” she said. “Grandma would want it. You’re the one who never had anything.”

On the twentieth of November, I turned in the last key at the leasing office. Carla came out from

behind her desk and walked the unit with me. It was empty and clean, the carpets shampooed, the walls bare. I got my full security deposit back, eleven hundred and fifty dollars, a check in an envelope.

“Good luck, Matt,” Carla said at the door. “I hope you find a place where people knock.”

Chapter Ten: A New Place

I found a new apartment in January, in a little brick building in Clintonville, three blocks from Trent’s

house. One bedroom, hardwood floors, a radiator that clanked, a window over the kitchen sink that looked out on a big oak tree. Eleven hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. I signed a twelve-month lease and paid my first month and my security deposit with the check Carla gave me and some

of what was left in my savings.

The first night, I sat on the floor of my empty living room with a pizza and a flashlight, because the electric company hadn’t turned on the power yet. It was the best night I’d had in months. Nobody

had a key but me. Nobody could walk in and decide anything for me.

I bought a new couch in February. It took me a while to save for it. I went to the same furniture store where I’d bought the first one, and the same salesman was there, an older man named Harold with a

mustache. He remembered me.

“The charcoal sectional,” he said. “Two years ago. You measured your living room twice.”

“Somebody threw it in a dumpster,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he walked me over to the same sectional, still on the showroom floor, a slightly newer model, and he took fifteen percent off without my asking.

Jolene helped me carry it up the stairs. That’s what I remember most about that day. My sister, five

foot four in her running shoes, on the bottom end of a ninety-pound couch on a narrow staircase, grunting and swearing and laughing so hard she had to set it down twice. We finally got it through my door and into the living room and under the window, where I’d measured for it, and the two of

us collapsed on it side by side, out of breath.

She’d gotten a job by then, in the billing department at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. The same hospital where she’d spent a year when she was six. She said she wanted to work somewhere that

had saved her once. She was renting a little studio apartment in Grandview, and she’d changed her phone number, and Derek had stopped trying after the protection order went through.

“Matt,” she said, lying on my new couch with her feet up on my coffee table. “Can I tell you

something?”

“Sure.”

“I was so jealous of you,” she said. “My whole life.”

I turned my head and stared at her. “Of me?”

“You were the one who could do everything,” she said. “You never needed anybody. Mom and Dad would talk about you to their friends like you were this miracle. Matt’s so independent. Matt never

asks for anything. Matt’s going to be fine.” She looked at the ceiling. “And I was the one who needed everything. The one who always fell apart. The one they had to keep catching. I hated it, Matt. I hated being the one they were scared for.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d never once thought about it that way.

“I think they did it to both of us,” Jolene said quietly. “They made me the fragile one and you the strong one. And neither of us got to be anything else.”

Chapter Eleven: Payback

In March, my father came to my new apartment for the first time.

He called first. He called two days ahead and asked if it would be all right if he came by on Saturday

afternoon, and when I said yes, he asked what time would be best for me. My father had never once in my life asked me what time would be best for me.

He knocked on my door at two o’clock exactly. He stood in the hallway in his good jacket, holding a

paper bag from a bakery and an envelope. When I opened the door, he didn’t come in right away. He stood there looking past me into my living room at the gray couch under the window.

“That looks like your old one,” he said.

“It’s the same one,” I said. “The new model.”

He nodded slowly. “Can I come in?”

I let him in. He sat down on my couch, carefully, like he was afraid of hurting it. He set the bakery bag

on the coffee table. Then he held out the envelope.

“That’s yours,” he said. “Eleven hundred dollars. For the couch I threw away.” He swallowed. “And forty-two hundred. For the lease.”

I looked at the envelope. I didn’t take it.

“Dad, I broke the lease myself. That was my choice.”

“You broke it because of me,” he said. “Because I walked into your home with your key and made you

feel like you didn’t have one.” He held it out farther. “Please, Matty. Take it. Your mother and I talked about it for a long time. We took it out of the money we were saving for Jolene’s student loans.”

I looked at my father. He was sixty-two years old. He’d paid for my sister’s college for six years on a

credit card. He’d taken a desk back to Target. He’d walked into my apartment with a moving truck. And he was sitting on my new couch holding out an envelope with his hands shaking.

I took the envelope. I opened it. Fifty-three hundred dollars, in a cashier’s check, made out to me.

Then I did something I’d been thinking about for a long time. I went to my kitchen drawer and took out a pen. I tore the bakery bag open and wrote on the back of it. And I handed it to him.

It said: Keep $4,200. Put it toward Jolene’s storage unit, and her new deposit when she’s ready for a

bigger place. I’ll keep the couch money.

Dad read it. He looked up at me.

“Matt,” he said. “That’s your money.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I get to decide what to do with it.”

He stared at me for a long time. Then he started to cry. My father, who I’d only ever seen cry at Grandma Evelyn’s funeral, sitting on my couch with a torn bakery bag in his hands.

“Your grandma would be so proud of you,” he said. “She always said you were the best of all of us. She said, Rick, that boy’s going to take care of everybody someday. You watch.” He wiped his eyes. “I didn’t listen. I didn’t watch. I just let you do it.”

I sat down next to him on the couch.

“I don’t want to take care of everybody, Dad,” I said. “I just want somebody to ask first.”

Chapter Twelve: The Key Tag

My mother came by in April. She brought a casserole and a potted plant, a peace lily she said would be hard to kill. She sat on my couch and looked around my little apartment at the radiator and the oak tree out the window and the bookshelf I’d dried out and refinished, and she cried for a while

without saying anything.

Before she left, she handed me a small box, wrapped in tissue paper. Inside was the photograph of the desk. The white particleboard desk with the lamp and the pencil cup, in a new frame.

“I don’t need it in my drawer anymore,” she said. “I need you to have it. So you know I remember.”

It’s on my bookshelf now, next to a picture of Grandma Evelyn holding me when I was three.

That summer, Jolene moved into a one-bedroom in Upper Arlington, a nicer place, with room for

Grandma Evelyn’s table. I helped her move it in. All six chairs. She wouldn’t let me take it.

“I changed my mind,” she said, standing in her new dining room with her hands on her hips. “I’m keeping it. But you’re coming to dinner every Sunday. And you get the head of the table.”

I’ve been to dinner at her place every Sunday since. Sometimes Mom and Dad come too. We sit around Grandma Evelyn’s walnut table, the four of us, and nobody gets the smaller portion. Last month, Jolene made lasagna and gave me the corner piece, the one with the crispy edges. She didn’t

say anything about it. She just put it on my plate.

On the first Sunday in October, a year after the couch, I brought something with me to dinner. A small paper bag. I set it on the table in front of my father, and he looked at me, and then he opened

it.

Inside was a key. A brass key on a ring, with a little round tag attached to it, the kind you buy at the hardware store with a metal edge and a paper center. I’d written on the tag in black ink, in neat

capital letters.

FOR EMERGENCIES. CALL FIRST. THE ANSWER IS PROBABLY YES.

Dad picked it up and looked at it for a long time. He turned the tag over in his fingers and read it

twice.

“Matt,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “You’re my dad. You should have a key. But this time, we both know what it’s for.”

He held it in his hand for a moment longer. Then he took his keyring out of his pocket, the same keyring he’d taken my old key off of at our kitchen table eleven months before, and he worked the new key onto it, slowly and carefully, the way you’d thread a needle. He put it back in his pocket and

patted it once, through his jacket.

Then he got up from the table and walked around it to where I was sitting, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he left it there.

Across the table, Jolene was smiling at me with her chin in her hand. Mom was wiping her eyes with a napkin. The lasagna was getting cold on Grandma Evelyn’s table, the table I sat under with my toy trucks one long year when I was three, waiting for somebody to come home.

They came home. It took them twenty-five years, but they came home.

Two weeks later, on a Thursday night, my phone rang at nine o’clock. It was Dad.

“Matty,” he said. “Your mother’s car won’t start, and I need to borrow your jumper cables. The good

ones, the long ones. I know where they are, in your hall closet.” He paused. “Can I use the key? I’m calling first.”

I laughed out loud, alone in my living room, on my gray couch under the window.

“Yes, Dad,” I said. “The answer’s yes.”