“You okay?”
I took a sip of coffee and realized something.
For once, my stomach wasn’t knotted waiting for Dalia’s next crisis.
I wasn’t trying to figure out how to make everybody happy.
I wasn’t rehearsing an explanation.
“I am,” I said.
And for the first time in a very long time, I meant it.
Around noon, my mother called.
I didn’t answer her either.
Her voicemail came a few minutes later.
“Vera, your sister feels abandoned. Please call me.”
I listened to it twice.
Abandoned.
That was the word she chose.
Not ashamed.
Not sorry.
Not horrified by what she’d done.
Abandoned.
I put my phone facedown on the counter.
For years, I’d been afraid of what would happen if I stopped rescuing my sister.
Now I was about to find out.
Full story continuation
Dalia stayed quiet for two days.
For anyone else, two days wouldn’t have meant much.
With my sister, it felt like weather gathering offshore.
On the third day, there was pounding at our apartment door.
Micah looked through the peephole.
“It’s Dalia.”
I was sitting on the couch about ten feet away.
“Don’t open it.”
He didn’t.
She knocked again, harder this time.
“Vera!”
Another round of pounding.
“Vera, I know you’re in there!”
Micah looked at me.
I shook my head.
Eventually he opened the door only a few inches, keeping himself between Dalia and the apartment.
She didn’t say hello.
She didn’t ask about me.
She went straight to the only subject that seemed to matter.
“I have five days to make rent.”
Micah said nothing.
“I spent my summer job money because I thought tuition was handled. She said she’d pay it.”
“You should talk to Vera when Vera wants to talk to you.”
“I have a right to know why she’s doing this.”
I could hear every word from the couch.
I waited.
This was the part where I thought she might finally say it.
I shouldn’t have ruined her wedding.
I shouldn’t have embarrassed her.
I was angry, and I crossed a line.
Anything.
Instead she said, “She has a moral obligation to follow through.”
Micah glanced back toward me but didn’t expose the fact that I was sitting right there.
“Vera isn’t home.”
It was the kindest lie he could have told me.
Dalia kept arguing.
The money had been promised.
The rent had been expected.
She couldn’t simply rearrange her life because I’d suddenly decided to be vindictive.
Still nothing about the wedding.