My Daughter Killed Me

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1

In our family it was always clear who was to blame. Me.

Not because I'd done anything. I'm just the youngest, and the youngest are convenient. Everything with nowhere else to land gets hung on them: a broken cup, a ruined holiday, Mom's tone on the phone. "Kelly, you understand, don't you." I understood. I've understood since I was a kid.

So when Mom called all three of us and told us to come together — one Saturday, one hour, to her place — I already knew I'd somehow turn out to be the guilty one. I just didn't know yet what for.

"I need to talk to all of you at once," she said. Her voice was even, like she was reading a grocery list. "Not over the phone. In person. The three of you."

"Did something happen?" I asked.

"Saturday, Kelly." And she hung up.

That was the whole conversation. Mom had a way of ending a call that left you standing there another minute with the phone to your ear, like an idiot.

I called Diana. Diana said, "The house, obviously. Or money. Or the house and money." Diana's the oldest, and she has a theory for everything — composed, final, delivered in a tone that doesn't invite questions. I called Vanessa. Vanessa said, "Maybe she finally got herself a lover and wants to introduce him" — and laughed, and we laughed a little together, because with Vanessa it's never any other way.

None of us guessed right.

Driving to Mom's is a little over two hours from the city, first on the highway, then on a road that gets narrower and narrower, past the gas station that closed back when Dad was still around, past the "FRESH EGGS" sign that's been hanging there as long as I can remember. The house sits at the end of a dirt road, apart from everything, in a ring of trees Dad once planted "for coziness," and they grew up and turned the coziness into a wall. No neighbors in sight. The only thing you hear is the gravel crunching under the tires and, somewhere far off, somebody's dog barking — a dog that couldn't care less about you.

I love that sound of gravel. It means — almost there, you can stop rehearsing your face.

That Saturday I rehearsed my face especially hard. Calm, warm, a little guilty — just in case. The face of the youngest daughter who's ten minutes late but brought Mom's favorite lemon cupcakes from the bakery that's still open.

I turned onto the dirt road and saw I'd been rehearsing for nothing.

There were cars at the house. Not ours. Two police cars, lights off, and one more, dark, unmarked, parked carelessly, at an angle. Between them — yellow tape, sagging from the morning damp, tied at one end to the porch railing and at the other to the young birch Dad never got around to cutting down.

The cupcakes on my lap suddenly felt very heavy.