to find it every day since she bought the house, dear,” said Mrs. Alma Fenwick, still holding my hands. My sister Dorothy went red, then pale, with my flowers crushed against her chest. “Margaret, you were not supposed to see this yet,” she said. “Please come inside.” I stepped over the threshold of the Victorian on Maple Terrace in Linden Gap for the first time in forty four years. The hallway smelled of lemon polish and old wood, and the staircase was exactly where my memory had kept it. My heart pounded so loudly that I thought the neighbors would hear it from the lawn.
Dottie led me into the front parlor and sat down hard. “The party is not at two o clock,” she said. “It is at five. I told the family to arrive early so everyone would be inside when you came. I told you the house was too small, because I knew you would offer to help set up, and you would see the green door and ruin the surprise. I bought this house back in October, Margaret. I used the money from selling the shop of my late husband. It is yours. All of it. The deed has your name.”
I did not understand, so she told me the part I had never known. In 1982, when she was sixteen, Dottie became very sick with a kidney illness and needed months of treatment at a children hospital in Philadelphia. Our parents sold the Victorian to pay thirty one thousand dollars in bills, and they told me only that there had been a family emergency. I was newly married in Ohio. They did not want me to feel guilty. “I have carried that house on my back for forty years,” Dottie said. “It was promised to you, and I was the reason it was lost.”
A woman discovers her sister secretly bought back the family home and a letter from their father waits in the old bedroom.
Mrs. Fenwick cleared her throat. “Your father stood on my porch the week before he passed away,” she told me. “He said, Alma, if Margaret ever comes back, send her to her old bedroom, to the window seat. He would not say more. Your sister has torn up the floorboards in three rooms looking for what he meant. I told her to wait for you.” Dottie laughed and wiped her eyes. “I did not want to give you the house without finding what Dad left. I was afraid it was a note saying he was sorry, and I wanted to read it first so I could say sorry too.”
We climbed the stairs together, my knees creaking, and found my old bedroom with the same blue wallpaper and the same cedar window seat under the glass. Dottie lifted the lid and showed me the plain boards. I ran my fingers along the edge, and the bottom panel shifted. Under it lay a small tin box, rusty at the corners. Inside were a brass key, a faded photograph of the two of us on that very porch, and an envelope with my name in the careful handwriting of my father, Harold Ellison. My sister sat on the bed and I opened the letter with trembling hands.
“Margaret,” it read, “this house was yours by my promise, and I broke it. Your mother and I sold it so Dottie could have the doctors she needed, and I would sell ten more. But I never stopped hoping that one day it would come back to the family. If it does, it belongs to both of my girls, because love is not a prize for the one who wins. Keep the key. It opens the green door. Be kind to each other. Dad.” I read it twice. Neither of us could say a word, and the whole house seemed to listen with us.
I looked around that bedroom and remembered the summer of 1975, when Dottie and I painted the front door green with leftover porch paint. Our father had stood on the lawn laughing, holding the ladder, and my mother had brought out lemonade in jelly glasses. Dottie had gotten more paint on her braids than on the door. I told her I still remembered every brushstroke. She said she had bought the house for that reason alone, because every time she drove through Linden Gap she saw the green door in her mind and heard the two of us laughing.
I put the letter down and took my little sister by both shoulders. “Dottie, I was hurt that you left me off the list,” I said. “And I was wrong to think the worst. You gave me my home back, and all I brought was a bunch of flowers.” She laughed and hugged me so hard that my glasses went crooked. Then I took the deed from the mantel, found a pen, and added her name next to mine at the bottom. “Dad said both of his girls,” I told her. “I mean to follow what he said.” She cried into my shoulder like she was sixteen.
At five o clock the whole family arrived, and the cousins were astonished to see the two of us standing in the doorway together. Dottie held up the brass key and said, “Welcome home, Margaret.” Our cousin Leonard, who had not spoken to me in twelve years, hugged me for a full minute. We ate on the porch, and the neighbors came by with pies. I learned that Dottie had kept the original front door because the carpenter wanted to replace it, and she had told him, “My sister will want to see it exactly the way it was.”
After everyone left, Dottie and I sat on the porch steps with two cups of tea, watching the light slide down the green paint of the door. I turned the old brass key in the lock, and it clicked so smoothly that it felt like the house had been waiting. For forty four years, I thought the front door of my childhood had closed forever. All it needed was a sister who refused to give up on finding the key. Some doors only stay shut until the right people stand on both sides.
