At My Mother’s Funeral My Sister Thought She Had Won Until I Opened the Door

with the journal in my lap when the doorbell rang.

Odora was alone on the porch. Darius’s car was nowhere in sight.

I made coffee. We sat at the kitchen table where our mother had made us breakfast for twenty years. The silence between us was old and complicated, the kind you have to push through rather than wait out.

She apologized for the side room,continue reading …