Dad pushed my work bag away from the kitchen chair before I could pick it up.
“Ring them,” he said. “Tell them you’re not coming back.”
I had twenty minutes to leave for my dispatch shift. His toast was on a plate, cut in half because he had asked me to cut it. The cast on his wrist rested beside it.
“You mean today?”
“I mean resign, June. I need someone here.”
I put my hand on the strap. He kept his good hand against the bag.
Dad said, “Your sister walked out. You’re going to have to take her place.”
Dad’s mobility problems were real. So was the broken wrist. I had driven over before work because he said he couldn’t manage breakfast, and now I stood there trying to work out how making toast had become an agreement to give up my job.
“I can’t just quit. I have rent.”
“Come home, then.”
“I worked hard to get this job.”
“And I worked hard to raise you. Family shouldn’t need strangers.”
I nearly said Celia had raised me. Instead, I pulled the bag toward myself. He let go, but his hand stayed where it had been.
Our mother died when I was eleven. Celia was nineteen. For the next six years, she packed my lunches and cared for Dad, sometimes coming into my room with his laundry still tucked under her arm. I remembered her helping me choose subjects for school while listening for him to call from downstairs.
At seventeen, I had understood all that as something she did because she was my sister. I hadn’t considered whether she got to stop.
“She didn’t even stay until you were grown,” Dad said.
I looked at the clock over his shoulder.
“We’ll talk after work.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. I can’t be left like this.”
I left anyway. That sounds firmer than it felt. I checked my phone as soon as I reached the car, already expecting him to call me back.
Through my shift, I did my job. Then I went to my flat and took Celia’s envelope out of the bottom drawer of my desk.
It had moved with me twice. Seven years, and I had never broken the seal.
I hadn’t lost it or forgotten it. Keeping it unread had been deliberate. She had left, and I wasn’t going to let her explain herself. If she wanted me to understand, she could come back and tell me in person. I had made that rule privately, then behaved as if she should know it.
My name was written across the front. The bottom of the J curved under the rest, the same way she used to label my school folders.
I slid a finger beneath the flap. The paper tore before the glue gave way.
There were two folded sheets inside. I put them down, got a glass of water, and came back without drinking any.
The first lines were about me.
June, leaving you is the part I don’t know how to do. I’m writing because I’m afraid that if we try to talk now, you’ll ask me to stay and I will.
I wanted to argue with that. She hadn’t stayed. Whatever she had been afraid of, she had gone through with it.
Then I read the next paragraph.
I can’t keep being Dad’s full-time carer because he says it is my duty. I’ve done it since Mum died. I love him, but I’m not agreeing to spend the rest of my life doing this.
I sat on the edge of my bed. When she left, I had been furious that she could choose a life away from us. Now Dad had asked for mine, and I had spent the journey home thinking of reasons he couldn’t have it.
Further down, Celia had written something I had never heard.
