2
Julian
My sister Hannah calls me out of the blue. “I have some news,” she says. “I’m getting married.”
I haven’t heard from her in more than eight months. The last time we talked was in December, right after the reading of my father’s will. She hadn’t been chatty then. Considering the circumstances, I can’t say I blame her. My father left the entirety of his estate to me: the crumbling mansion that was our childhood home, his dwindling investment portfolio, the moth-eaten furniture, and the gloomy portraits. Hannah got nothing. In a final, cruel twist, he’d insisted she attend the reading of the will in person so she could learn, in real-time, that he had cut her out of his will.
Fuck that. My parents treated her like garbage all through our childhood. I never understood why, but I wasn’t about to perpetuate it. I got Kincaid Castle appraised. The appraiser gave me two figures. One was for the amount the house was worth in its current dilapidated condition, and the other was for the amount it would be worth if I fixed it up. I had a lifetime of injustice to make up for, so I sold my condo in New York and wrote her a check for the larger amount. I moved back to my childhood home in Highfield in January with the intention of fixing it up, selling it, and getting the hell out of here.
It’s now September. The house is still a disaster.
“Congratulations,” I say now. “Who's the lucky guy?”
“His name is Samir, and I'm the lucky one. You want to meet him?”
“I'd love to.”
“How about this weekend? We’ll drive down.”
We meetat a bar close to my home. It’s good to see Hannah. Really good. “Thanks for the money,” she says, giving me a hug. “You didn’t have to.”
“Of course, I did.” I shake hands with Samir. “Good to meet you.”
I buy the first round, and the three of us get chatting. “I like him,” I tell Hannah when Samir gets up to buy the second. “Not that my opinion should matter, given everything.” I search my sister’s face. “He makes you happy?”
Her eyes light up. “He does, yes. Every single day.”
“And everything else? How are things with you?”
She lifts her shoulders in a shrug. “I'm getting there,” she says. “Samir encouraged me to see a therapist.”
I should do that too. “Is it helping?”
“Yeah, I think so. Dr. Welch has been great.” She looks at me. “She wants me to talk about my feelings.”
Samir is still talking to the bartender. He's obviously giving us space. To do what? Have an emotionally intense conversation about our parents? Ugh. I pull a pencil out of my pocket and start doodling on the napkin. It’s a bad habit I have. When things get messy and complicated, I retreat into my comics. I bury myself in work and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist. “That’s good.”
“She thinks I bottle my emotions. She said that I needed to get better at advocating for myself. It would help me resolve some of my issues.” She smiles wryly at my sketch. “You draw when things get difficult. I avoid my problems by running away.”
“Avoiding your problems is a bad thing?” I quip. “That's my default answer to everything.”
“Yeah, Julian, I know.” She holds my gaze. “I’ve been angry with you for a very long time. You were the golden child. You could do no wrong. I found it hard not to resent you.”
When Hannah turned seventeen, my parents told her that there was no money for her college education. My sister looked at them, then looked at the brand-new car they'd gifted me when I turned twenty-one and decided she was done. There was a huge blowout. Hannah told them she wouldn’t let herself be treated like garbage any longer, and she moved out. She never saw them again.
I take a deep breath. My first instinct is to run. My second is to be defensive. I want to blurt out that I didn't create the damn situation. I was a kid too. I didn’t know how to handle things any better than Hannah did. But that’s not right. As hard as my parents’ favoritism was for me, it was so much worse for her. And I'm her big brother. I should have watched out for her better. “I’m sorry. I really am. It was so hard for you, and I wish I’d done more to protect you from it. If there's anything I can do to make amends. . .”
“There is one thing.”
I tilt my head to the side. “I’m being set up, aren’t I?”
There's a glimmer of mischief in her eyes that takes me back in time. When we were kids, we stayed with my grandparents for one summer. One beautiful, perfect summer where we were siblings, not forced adversaries.
“A little bit,” she admits. “One thing that my therapist has been helping me with is making peace with my childhood. Samir and I talked about it. I want to get married at the house.”
I don’t think I heard her correctly. “At Kincaid Castle? Seriously?”
“I want to replace bad memories with good ones. Can I?”