Another sister.

June 5, Carney's Point.

She answered the phone and said hello and fourteen years disappeared the instant I heard her voice.
Her name is Mary Ellen and that summer a friend and I, both on our first journalism internships, sublet a room from her in Mendenhall, just over the state line from Delaware.
I've been hoping to find her again for fourteen years, I've wondered how she was and whether her boyfriend, Ed, was still around, whether she bought and renovated the house with the big "mother tree" in the backyard as she'd hoped, how her daughter, Jessica, had done and what her granddaughter, Chelsea, had grown up to look like, she was almost two and Mary Ellen would bathe her in the kitchen sink, we would sit out on the screened porch and sip tea, we would go on long walks in the big, magical park not far from the house.
Memory of joy, running in a field of tall grass on a sunny afternoon.
My brother died shortly thereafter and the summer was over.
She did buy the house, it's a dream and she's hanging on, the economy is hurting, Jessica is still a challenge, Chelsea is fifteen and living with her father with her brother, Tyler, who's twelve. Jessica moved back with her mother a year ago with her four-year-old, Portia.
And Ed, Ed did move in with her.
He was a keeper, she said.
So is she.