I crumpled yet another sheet of paper into a ball, tossing it into the garbage along with the dozen others already there. Whenever I got going, there was always too much to say, and the letter ended up being too long and convoluted to make any sense to the reader. It needed to be clear. It needed to be concise. But not so concise that it said almost nothing about my rationale for the decision. It was a difficult balance. Too much had happened in such a short time, and I wanted to address it all.

But I couldn’t possibly address three years in a few pages. That’s why I kept starting over.

I pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the stack of loose leaf that I kept in the desk drawer. I had bought the packet of it for my son about four years ago, when he first started high school. It had been on the supply list, but he hadn’t opened it at all. It came home in his backpack on the last day of school untouched. So I stuck it in the office, thinking that I’d need it for myself one day. Four years later, and it was being used as trash can filler.

I started again.

Dear David,

I don’t hold anything against you. I understand why you did what you did. I don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t see where you are coming from. That said, I don’t believe that you’ve been entirely fair to me. I wish we could have come to some kind of agreement about this, but honestly, I don’t see how we are ever going to see eye to eye again. There is too much hurt between us now for me to ever trust you with anything important. Even if we can manage to come together at some point in the future, the hurt you’ve done to me feels like it will never go away. I’m not being dramatic when I say I will never get over it.

I paused, my pen hanging above the paper, looking at the last sentence I had written. I perhaps was being dramatic with that one, but I also didn’t care. David had taken the one thing that I had always wanted for my own, and he refused to recognize I had told him multiple times that it should have been mine. He claimed that Mom said he could have it, even though she and I had always talked about how it would become mine when she died. David also claimed that he had no idea that Mom had promised it to me, or else he wouldn’t have taken it. He was a liar, and he was a cheat. If he felt so bad about taking it, then why didn’t he just give it to me?

The item in question wasn’t really worth anything at all except the nostalgia. In fact, if other people in the family knew we were arguing over it, I’m sure they would laugh. “That old thing? Why do you care?” It wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t an heirloom. It wasn’t something that was irreplaceable. It wasn’t even an item that was hard to find in the store now. If I wanted one, I could just go and buy one for myself.

It was a bowl. We were arguing over a bowl. My brother and I were about to completely end our relationship over one of Mom’s bowls.

Yes, it was just a bowl, but it really wasn’t about the bowl. It was all the memories that were wrapped up in that bowl. All the summer berries, and pie filling, and sausage balls, and bread dough, and pancake patter that got mixed up in our house as kids were always mixed up in that huge ceramic bowl. And I wanted it. I had wanted it for as long as I could remember. I clearly remember watching Mom mash strawberries in that bowl as I stood on a stool as a four year old kid. I remember thinking as I watched, “I’m gonna do that one day, when I’m a mom too, and I have a big bowl like that.”

And David took it.

When Mom died David and I had rented a dumpster and a storage pod. The dumpster we filled up in a single day. The pod took a little while longer to fill. We packed and repacked boxes. My husband, Stephen, filled up his truck at least 4 times with boxes for Goodwill. We put things in the pod only to take them back out again and put them into Steven’s truck. As the kids ran around the yard and climbed the dogwoods and redbuds, Steven, David and David’s wife Marian worked. Sorting, sorting sorting.

It wasn’t just Mom’s old things. It was our old things too. Dad’s old things. Stuff that had belonged to our grandparents. Items that both of us wanted but didn’t know what to do with. Items that neither of us wanted, but we felt bad about getting rid of. What to do with the piano, and the coffee table that Grandpa had made, and the dining room set that was in near perfect condition? We needed buyers for the antiques. We needed evaluations. We needed help. We needed our parents.

And then there were the things that both of us wanted, and we knew we would fight over. We ended up drawing straws for Dad’s family Bible, Mom’s china set, a painting of Bodie Island Light, and a truly ancient sandwich press that will probably still work once we are both dead (it makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches, and I will die on that hill).

I never thought I’d have to fight him about the mixing bowl. He never even mentioned it to me in all the sorting, purging, packing, and moving. It was in the kitchen one day, and then the next it was gone.

I looked back at the letter I had written, my pen ready to write out the next word, even though my brain didn’t know what it would be. I could not shake the feeling of betrayal. Betrayal. The word would not leave my thoughts. I turned it over and over, like a crystal in the sunlight. It sparkled in places I hadn’t seen at first glance. Yes, David betrayed me, and he wasn’t even sorry.

I wrote out the words slowly. You betrayed me David, and I wish I understood why.

I sealed up the letter in the envelope. I put it in the mailbox with a leftover stamp from sending out my daughter’s graduation invitations. He hadn’t come to the party we’d had for her last week. The less charitable part of me said it was because he was a coward.

I did not want this to be the end of the story, but I didn’t think I would get an answer from David. I went back into the house and tried not to think about it.