Vanessa was laughing at my kitchen floor when her phone began to ring.
She had been in my house for less than four minutes, and already she had found three things to dislike: the gravel driveway, the chipped porch railing, and the fact that I had not replaced the old yellowed light fixture above the entryway. She stood in my half-finished living room with her sunglasses still on top of her head, one manicured finger tracing the edge of a paint sample card like she was afraid my walls might stain her.
“Well,” she said, looking around at the exposed drywall, the stacked flooring boxes, and the plastic sheet covering the doorway to the kitchen, “it has potential.”
Potential, when Vanessa said it, meant pity dressed for church.
I set the kettle on the stove and said nothing.
The phone buzzed again from inside her designer handbag, louder this time, rattling against something metal. Vanessa sighed as if the entire world was rude for needing her attention. She pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and rolled her eyes.
“Rosalind,” she said. “My neighbor. She panics if the landscapers come fifteen minutes late.”
Then she answered.
I watched her face change before she said a word.
The smirk softened first. Then her eyebrows drew together. Her free hand moved toward her throat, touching the small gold chain she wore with the tiny diamond pendant my mother had called “tasteful but not flashy,” which in our family meant expensive enough to respect.
“What do you mean, notices?” Vanessa said.
The kettle began to tremble on the burner.
Her eyes flicked toward me and away again.
“No, that can’t be right. Rosalind, slow down. Who is at your house?”
I turned the flame down before the kettle could whistle.
Vanessa walked toward the front window, her heels clicking against subfloor I had not yet covered in oak. Through the glass, my yard looked like exactly what she had expected: overgrown edges, a rusted shed leaning near the fence, a wheelbarrow upside down beside a pile of salvaged brick. A little house on the edge of town that my family had laughed about for three weeks.
Then Vanessa whispered, “Is there tape on our driveway?”
Her voice no longer sounded like my sister’s.
It sounded like someone realizing the floor beneath her was not as solid as she had paid to believe.
She ended the call without saying goodbye. For one second, she just stood there, phone clutched in her hand, looking at nothing.
“What happened?” I asked.
She turned slowly. Her makeup still looked perfect, but all the color had left her face.
“The county is at Fairlake Reserve,” she said. “They’re putting notices on houses.”
I did not ask which houses.
I already knew.
Three weeks earlier, my mother had laughed at me across a Sunday dinner table and said, “You’ll never own a home like your sister’s.”
She said it while scrolling through photos of Vanessa’s new house as if presenting evidence in a case she had won. Marble kitchen. Double staircase. Pool with blue tile. Home theater. Three-car garage. The kind of gated community where every lawn looked expensive and every mailbox had rules.
My aunt admired the waterfall island.
My father nodded without looking up from his plate. “Your mother’s right, Nora. Some people just aim higher.”