"Your wife is a loser! If it wasn't for her, you'd have given me the money and I wouldn't have to sit here! This is all because of that barren witch…"
"Are you going to pick up, or are we listening to this ringtone till morning?"
Katie froze with the paintbrush in her hand, just above the porcelain face of the doll. The question came without any real accusation — more like tired resignation, as if she'd already asked it a hundred times.
Mark sat hunched over a technical drawing, gripping a compass between his fingers. He didn't look up, even though the phone buzzed on the table so insistently the blueprints spread beneath it trembled.
"I know who it is," he said quietly, drawing a line for the future building facade. "And so do you."
"That's exactly why you need to answer, Mark. You can't keep sticking your head in the sand forever."
He set down the pencil. Not sharply — just heavily. He looked at the screen, where a short name blinked, the one that always gave him a stiff neck afterward.
Dana. His sister. The one person who could turn any quiet evening into a full-blown disaster.
He hit the green button and immediately pulled the phone away from his ear.
"Mark! Why do you never pick up?!" His sister's voice was shrill, insistent, demanding immediate attention. "I have news! I'm coming over!"
"Dana, it's ten o'clock at night," he tried to sound calm, though the familiar bitterness was already rising inside him. "Where are you going? Why?"
"What do you mean why? To my brother's! I'm already in the cab, I'll be at your building in twenty minutes. And make something to eat, I haven't had a bite since morning, nothing but stress, nothing but stress!"
The call cut off. Mark set the phone on the edge of the table, which was covered in a layer of sawdust and cardboard scraps. He looked at Katie. In her eyes was understanding mixed with a longing for the peace they were about to lose again.
"She's coming," he said.
"For how long?" his wife asked, going back to painting the doll's eyes.
"Dana never comes for a short visit. She comes until she's drained everything dry."
Mark built architectural scale models for developers around the Chicago suburbs — a job for people with endless patience: he cut miniature windows out of acrylic, glued together trees from wire and foam, constructed neighborhoods that fit on a single tabletop. His workshop always smelled of contact cement and fresh-cut wood. It was always quiet there.
Katie, in the next room, made collectible dolls — sold mostly through online shops based out of Portland and Austin. Their apartment in the Lincoln Square neighborhood felt like a museum of silence and painstaking work.
Dana was a hurricane that blew through that museum and knocked the exhibits off the shelves.
She showed up half an hour later, trailing the scent of heavy, sweet perfume and rain. Two enormous rolling suitcases banged over the threshold. Dana, thirty-six, heavyset, with garish, carelessly applied makeup, dropped her coat straight onto the entryway floor.
"God, what a climb, you'd get old just walking up here!" she announced instead of a greeting, kissing Mark's cheek with damp lips. "Katie, hi! Still playing with those creepy little dolls of yours?"
Katie came out of her room, wiping her hands on a rag. She was the complete opposite of her sister-in-law: small, composed, quiet.
"Hi, Dana. The dolls have names, and they're collector's pieces, not creepy."
"Oh please, give me a break, they're terrifying, eyes like dead people's," the guest waved a hand, walking into the kitchen still in her shoes. Mud tracked straight onto the light-colored laminate floor. "Mark, put the kettle on! What do you have to eat? I told you, I'm starving."
Mark silently picked up his sister's coat and hung it on the hook. Then he grabbed a rag and wiped up the shoe prints. It was a reflex he knew by heart: cleaning up after her. He'd done it his whole life. First it was picking up toys she'd scattered, then dealing with her teachers at school, then paying off her payday loans.
Their parents had poured everything they had into Dana, and even things they didn't have. She was the late baby, the "sunshine," allowed to get away with anything. Mark, eleven years older, had been more of a helper to their parents, a second father figure — never the object of that same blind devotion.
When their parents were gone, that relay baton passed to him automatically. "Don't abandon Dana, she can't manage on her own," his mother had whispered on the geriatric ward at Northwestern Memorial, gripping his hand with her dry, feverish one. And he'd promised.
In the kitchen, Dana was already rummaging through the fridge.
"Look at this, empty as a grocery store the day before Thanksgiving!" she complained, pulling out a jar of homemade pâté. "Nothing but vegetables and little jars. No regular lunch meat or anything?"
"We don't really eat that stuff," Mark answered calmly, following her in. "Dana, let's get to the point. Why the suitcases?"
Dana dropped into a chair, which groaned pitifully under her weight, and opened the jar of pâté without asking permission.
"I rented out my place," she announced, mouth full. "For a year. I need the money, Mark. Debts, you know. The payment on my fur coat, remember? And I can't make ends meet otherwise. There's no decent work out there, everywhere wants you to work like a dog and pay peanuts."
Mark and Katie exchanged a look.
"And where exactly do you plan on living for that year?" Katie asked carefully, though the answer was obvious.
"What do you mean where? Here with you two!" Dana looked genuinely surprised by the question. "Plenty of room, you don't even have kids, the guest room's just sitting empty. We'll live like one big family! It'll be fun!"
Mark felt a cold knot tightening inside him.
"Dana, we already talked about this," he said firmly. "You can't just move in. We have work to do, we need quiet. You could've at least asked."
"Asked? My own brother?" Dana set down her fork, her face twisting into a look of injury. "So that's how it is, huh? Mom would be rolling in her grave if she heard this! You're throwing me out? On the street?"
That was her signature move. Manipulation by way of the dead. Mark knew the script by heart, but every time, it still found a crack in him.
"Nobody's throwing you out right now," he said, exhausted. "But a year is impossible. A week. Until you find a place."
"A week?!" Dana was outraged. "Are you out of your mind! I already spent the rent money my tenants gave me, already handed it out to pay off debts! I don't have anything left to rent with!"
A month passed. It was a month of misery.
Quiet left the Lincoln Square apartment for good. Dana woke up late, around one, and immediately turned on the TV. She watched morning talk shows where people screamed at each other, and she commented out loud, talking over the hosts. She never washed her dishes. Mountains of plates with dried-on food piled up in the sink. She used Katie's expensive face creams without asking, leaving the tubes open in the bathroom until they dried out and went bad.
But worst of all was her attitude toward their work. One day Mark walked into the workshop and found that Dana had set a wet umbrella right on top of the neighborhood model he'd spent three weeks building for a developer in the western suburbs. The cardboard had gone soft, the lines had smeared. The model was ruined — and with it, a contract worth nearly six thousand dollars.
"Dana!" His shout, for the first time in years, rattled the walls of the apartment.
"Oh, big deal, some pieces of cardboard," she scoffed, not even looking up from her phone. "Glue together new ones. Why are you yelling. You've gotten so uptight, Mark. It's that desk job of yours."
Katie tried not to get involved, so as not to provoke a fight, but Dana seemed to actively look for chances to needle her sister-in-law.
"You should at least put some makeup on," she told Katie over breakfast, studying her bare face. "Because Mark's going to start looking at younger women soon. Men like what they see. And you're just so drab, so washed-out…"
That day Katie left the kitchen without answering. She shut herself in her room among rows of dolls with open eyes, all watching her identically from every shelf. She sat down at her worktable, picked up a brush — and for twenty minutes didn't paint a single line. Through the wall, Dana's TV blared a commercial for a cash advance loan.
That evening, after Dana had fallen asleep in front of the TV with the remote still in her hand, Mark shut himself in the workshop with his wife.
"I can't do another month," Katie said quietly, but without a tremor in her voice, matter-of-fact, like she was reading off a cost estimate. "It's not that she's living here. It's that she treats us like hired help. And treats your work like garbage."
"I know," Mark answered. "I'll give her money. I'll cover the deposit on a studio so she can move out."
"No," Katie said, and set the brush down on its stand, precisely, like she was placing a period at the end of a sentence. "You've given her money ten times already. Every time, she comes back. Because it's always safer with you than on her own. We need to do something she can't come back from."
The next day Mark drove to a notary's office on Devon Avenue — alone, without telling Dana. Their apartment was listed on the deed jointly with Katie, split fifty-fifty, but the lease on the workshop — the other space, over on Fillmore, where he kept his equipment and models — had listed his sister as a co-tenant, added years earlier "just in case," so she'd have somewhere to register when she was job-hunting in the city as a young woman. It was a loose end Dana remembered and had built her sense of security on — that no matter what happened, she'd always have somewhere to fall back on permanently.
Mark terminated her portion of the lease and signed a new agreement solely in his own name. He paid off the landlord's outstanding balance — four thousand two hundred dollars that Dana owed in back rent for six months, which Mark hadn't even known about until it came up while signing the paperwork. He paid it from his own account, without saying a word to her.
That evening, when Dana came back from shopping she'd charged to his credit card, she found an envelope on the table in the entryway. Inside was a copy of the new workshop lease — without her name on it — along with a note in his handwriting: "By Friday. Room at Sandra's place (my old friend from high school, she agreed to put you up for a month) — number's inside. Your things are in the suitcases by the door."
"What is this supposed to be?!" Dana stormed into the workshop, waving the envelope. "You're throwing me out like some stranger?! And the workshop?! I was registered there!"
"You were," Mark said calmly, not lifting his hands from the cardboard roof of the new model house he'd started gluing that afternoon. "Not anymore. I changed the lease this morning, the notary has a copy, so does the landlord. If you want to fight about the paperwork — go ahead, take it to court, but you won't win anything, because you never paid rent, I did, on your behalf."
"And the debt?! You paid off my back rent just so you could kick me out now?!"
"I paid it off so nobody would come after you when you moved out. That was a gift, not an investment in you staying here."
Dana stood in the doorway, gripping the envelope so hard the paper crumpled. Her face was shaking.
"Mom would've…"
"Mom asked me not to leave you without help," Mark cut in, finally looking up. "She didn't ask me to let you walk all over us and our work for the rest of our lives. The room at Sandra's is paid through the end of the month, that's my gift to help you get started. The job — find it yourself, you're a grown woman."
Katie appeared in the doorway with a tray holding two mugs of tea — one for herself, one for Mark. She set it down on the table beside the model, and set nothing down for Dana.
"I already called you a cab," she said quietly. "It'll be here in ten minutes."
Dana looked at them both, opened her mouth as if to say something more about their dead mother, or about her ungrateful brother — but nothing came out. She turned, grabbed one suitcase, then the other, and hauled them banging down the hallway.
The door slammed. Silence settled over the apartment — the same silence they remembered from a month ago, except now it sounded different: not fragile, like something about to be trampled at any moment, but like something that finally belonged to them alone.
Mark went back to the little house with the cardboard roof. Katie sat down beside him, picked up her brush, and finished painting the doll's second eye.
