A check for two thousand four hundred dollars, made out in Claire’s handwriting. And a notecard, in the same handwriting, that said: “Not a loan repayment. A late thank-you for September.”
I read the notecard twice. Then I sat on my front steps for a few minutes, not doing anything, which is something I have apparently started doing more often since February.
The thing about the check was not the money, though the money was real and I was glad to have it back. The thing about the check was what it represented in terms of the cognitive work Claire had done. To send that check, she had to have thought through the September booking in detail: the fact that I had paid the deposit, the fact that the deposit was nonrefundable, the fact that the contract transfer had not and could not return that money to me, the fact that I had absorbed a twenty-four hundred dollar loss as a direct consequence of a situation she had created.
She had to have done that accounting. She had to have landed on the figure — not two thousand, not three thousand, but twenty-four hundred, the exact amount — and decided that the right thing to do was to make it right. Not because I asked. Not because anyone suggested it. Because she did the math herself and arrived at the same number I had.
That tells me something about who my sister is, underneath the anxiety and the image management and the complicated feelings about our dynamic. She is a person who eventually does the accounting. She is a person who eventually makes things right when she can. She went about it in a painful roundabout way this time, and there were weeks in which I would not have described her in these terms, but this is who she is at the bottom of things.