Sign the house over to your brother, Eleanor, or don’t bother showing up to

Saturday came. I wore the navy dress Mom picked out for me last spring, back when she could still hold a pencil. The funeral home was packed — neighbors, her old church choir, the hospice nurses who’d become family. Travis arrived twenty minutes late in sunglasses, Brittany clinging to his arm like she was auditioning for widow of the year. He didn’t hug me. He didn’t look at the casket. He leaned in and whispered, “You bring the paperwork?” I smiled for the first time in a week. “Actually, Travis, the estate attorney is here. He wanted to read something before the service.” Mr. Halloran stepped up to the small podium, cleared his throat, and unfolded Mom’s final will — the one she’d updated eight months ago, witnessed by her doctor and two nurses, the one I’d never mentioned because Mom asked me not to. “To my daughter Eleanor, who bathed me, fed me, and stayed when staying cost her everything — I leave the house on Linden Street, the savings accounts, and the lake cabin.” Travis’s jaw dropped. “To my son Travis, who chose his calendar over his mother, I leave the sum of one dollar and the lesson that love is not a thing you can inherit when you refused to earn it.” The room went silent. Brittany’s hand slid off his arm like a wet leaf. Travis stood up so fast his chair screeched. “This is a joke. She wasn’t in her right mind —” Mr. Halloran calmly produced the cognitive evaluation, signed and notarized. “She was. We made sure.” Travis turned to me, red-faced. “Eleanor, you owe me. I’m your brother.” I picked up my purse and walked past him toward the casket. I kissed Mom’s forehead one last time. Then I looked back at him, my voice steady for the first time in three years. “You had a mother, Travis. You just didn’t show up for her. Don’t bother showing up for me either.” I drove home to the house on Linden Street that night. I slept in Mom’s bed. And for the first time since she got sick, I slept through till morning.