Friday dawned unseasonably warm. Air sat sticky. They went out early to scatter their mother’s ashes between the trees deep on their property, where camas flowers bloomed white and purple and delicate hemlock needles whispered overhead. Elena knelt in the dirt to spread the cremains with her fingers. Sam stood behind to watch. Her sister’s shoulders shone with sweat already. That was their mother, there, Sam told herself of the gray on the ground, but it was difficult to believe—the transformation from woman, life-giver, to dirt. Her ashes rolled into the earth under Elena’s palms. At last Elena stood, her cheeks slick, and said, “We’ll get a stone soon. I looked online. Some aren’t too expensive.”

Back at the house for breakfast, they opened the windows to relieve the heat, but no breeze blew in to help. While Sam, in a tank top, cleared the table, Elena came out in her uniform and said, “When are you going back to work?”

Sam shrugged.

“Today?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. She put eggy plates in the sink to soak. “I mean, does it matter?”

Elena blinked. Her pink-rimmed eyes, dressed up for the day by mascara. “Yeah, Sammy, it does. We need the money.”

Sam twisted the bag shut on a loaf of bread. “How long before we list the house?”

She’d thought that would be an easy question—one of Elena’s many items already checked on her mourning to-do list—but it was met with silence. Then Elena said, “What do you mean?”

The plastic untwisted in Sam’s hands. She put the loaf down. “When are we going to list the house for sale? We just have to manage the bills until then, right?”

Elena looked baffled. She hadn’t been this disoriented when she woke Sam in the middle of the night to tell her their mother was dead. It was a confusion far too large for this conversation. “We’re not going to sell the house.”

Sam said, “So we can move.”

“We’re not—”

“What are you talking about,” Sam said, throat tightening. “You told me. Years ago. After you graduated. That this house was worth half a million dollars, and after Mom died, we would sell it, and we would move. You told me that. That’s been the plan for a fucking decade.”

“I told you that?”

Sam didn’t understand. Elena was acting as if this was new. “We literally talk about it all the time.”

“No,” Elena said, “you talk about moving, yes, I know you want to get out of here, I know that, but I didn’t— If I told you that when I was a teenager, then I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what I was talking about. We had to remortgage this place, Sam. You have no idea how much debt has piled up from Mom’s medical bills. We’ve been underwater for years. If we sell, only the bank makes money, and we’d have nowhere to live.”

Sam heard Elena’s words (I’m sorry). She heard remortgage and debt piled but their meaning splintered, mirror fragments, and everything became distorted. Underwater? How? She said, slower, “You told me that we’d sell the house and move off this island. That’s what we’re going to do.” Elena had forgotten, somehow, in her grief. Sam would make her remember.

“You—” Elena went to the table and pulled forward the papers they’d pushed to the corner so they could have their meal. Hot air stirred. “Do you need to see the actual numbers? Have you not noticed the situation we’re in? I know you’re happy to disappear into your fantasies and leave the tough stuff to me, but didn’t they tell you at Dr. Boyce’s every time you took Mom in? We owe that office thousands. Plus twelve thousand dollars to the hospital for Mom’s emergency room visits last year.” She was spreading the papers out. White sheets with black digits and capital letters in lines. “Don’t you wonder where your money goes each month? The mortgage payment takes almost everything. The pandemic fucked us. You didn’t work for ages. I don’t know how we’ll ever pay off the credit cards. Just her cremation is costing us eleven hundred. Do you get that? This is it, this is everything. We better make the most of this, because we’re not going anywhere.”