My Sister Thanked Me For Letting Her Stay Through Thanksgiving – But I Had Only Agreed To Three Weeks
PART 2
Maya slept badly that night. I knew because my hallway floor squeaked twice after midnight and once at four.
At breakfast she was dressed for work before I came into the kitchen. She managed inventory for a medical-supply warehouse and usually left at seven-fifteen. That morning she was already holding her keys.
“I’ll be late tonight,” she said.
“Okay.”
“There’s soup in the fridge.”
“I know. I made it.”
She looked annoyed. “I was just saying.”
“So was I.”
She left without taking coffee.
At ten, Mom texted me.
Be gentle with your sister.
I stared at the message until the letters blurred into what they really meant: Maya had called her.
I typed, Please stay out of it.
Then deleted it and wrote, We’re handling it.
Mom replied with a thumbs-up, which was how she communicated skepticism without technically arguing.
That evening I waited until Maya had changed clothes.
“Three weeks ends Friday,” I said. “I’m not asking you to leave Friday. I am asking us to choose a real date.”
She sat at the kitchen table.
“Can we say end of October?”
It was October ninth.
“That’s three more weeks.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
Her shoulders dropped.
“Okay?”
“Yes. October thirty-first.”
She nodded slowly. “That’s fair.”
I felt relief so quickly it made me suspicious.
Then I asked, “What happened with the room on Franklin Street?”
Maya looked up.
“What room?”
“The month-to-month place you mentioned last week.”
She picked at a scratch in the table.
“I passed.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t right.”
“You said it was clean and close to work.”
“It was.”
“Then what wasn’t right?”
She did not answer.
I waited.
Finally she said, “Mom told me you said you liked having somebody here.”
I felt something shift.
“I did say that.”
“She said you told her the house had been too quiet since Alex moved.”
That was also true.
Maya looked at me. “So I thought maybe there wasn’t a reason to hurry.”
Maya got up and opened the refrigerator, even though she was not hungry.
“I wasn’t trying to move in forever,” she said.
“I know.”
“You keep saying that like you’re trying not to say something worse.”
“I’m trying to be accurate.”
She closed the refrigerator again. “Do you know what Mom said?”
“I can probably guess.”
“She said after Alex moved out, you kept finding reasons to come over there. You brought her lamps to fix. You reorganized her hall closet. You stayed for dinner three nights one week.”
I frowned. “Her hall closet was dangerous.”
“It had coats.”
“It had a vacuum cleaner balanced on a box of Christmas lights.”
“Cara.”
I knew what she meant.
