I pressed play on the voicemail with my brand-new hearing aids, and I heard every word Doreen said, crying. Ray, Margaret wrote me a letter too. She mailed it the day before she died. She told me where the cabin was. She told me to come. And Ray, she told me something about you.
Doreen did not find my cabin on Seagull Lake to take it. My Margaret sent her.
In her last days, Margaret wrote two letters. One she left under the little carved moose on the mantel, for me. One she mailed to the sister she had not spoken to in five years, to Doreen. She was tired of the quarrel that started at Thanksgiving in 2019, and she was not going to leave this world with her only sister on the outs with her husband.
In my letter, Margaret asked me to forgive Doreen. In Doreens letter, Margaret told her the truth about 2019, that the ugly words had come from a misunderstanding Margaret herself could have cleared up and never did, and that I was a good man who had made her happy for forty years. That was the something about you Doreen meant.
I thought my sister-in-law had come to rob a grieving man. She had come because a dying woman asked her to make peace with him.
The quilt Doreen was holding, she was folding, not taking. Lyle with his cooler and his borrowed canoe, well, Lyle is Lyle, and he thought they were just opening up a cabin. They did not know I would see it on a trail camera meant for moose and call the Cook County sheriff.
I called the deputy back and told him to stand down, that it was family, that my wife had arranged the whole thing from her deathbed and I was too thick to see it until I heard her sisters voice.
Doreen and I sat on my dock that weekend and read our letters out loud to each other. The cabin is mine, deed and all, one hundred sixty-seven thousand, Margarets life insurance and our savings. But Margaret used it to give me back her sister. We watch for her moose together now. Doreen says Margaret always did get the last word.