I called her after I deposited the check. She answered on the second ring.
“I got it,” I said.
“Good.” A pause. “I didn’t know how to bring it up in person. I thought writing it was better.”
“Writing it was better.”
“The note was harder than the check,” she said. “I wrote six versions.”
“The version you sent was right.”
We talked for a little while. Nothing important. But we talked, and it was comfortable in a way that our conversations had not quite been before, as if the check had cleared a remaining amount of debt in the emotional accounting as well as the financial one.
When we got off the phone I put the notecard in the same folder as the contract and the deposit receipt and the transfer documents. It was the last document in the sequence. The folder was complete.
## On Being the Older One
I have spent most of my adult life being seven years older than my sister, which sounds tautological but is actually a condition that shapes things in non-obvious ways.
Seven years means I was driving when she was still in elementary school. It means I went to college when she was in middle school. It means that by the time she was figuring out who she was, I was already, from her vantage point, figured out. Established. That apparent establishment was never as real as it looked — I was figuring things out too, on my own schedule, with my own uncertainty — but from where Claire was standing, she was always looking at someone who seemed to have already arrived.