When my mom died, my sister and I inherited a nearly-paid-off house we couldn’t afford in a neighborhood we couldn’t live in. It was also the house she had just died in, the house she had been sick in, and we were both teenagers.

We sold it. Immediately, we said we wanted to sell. The remaining adults handled it, quick and quiet.

In the weeks following, objects that had felt permanent were purged, the walls gaped blankly at us, and the screened-in porch off the back, which had always felt crowded, was abruptly enormous.

Before we left for good, I stood out there and looked at the yard she had loved so much, the bald spots of half-started gardens, all in the wrong places. Too far from the hose, in the shade, whatever. The romance of having a garden there obliterating sense, sowing seeds where they wouldn’t, couldn’t grow. A week of frenzied work and wide-rimmed sunhats before she abandoned it, made watering my chore for a while before she forgot, and I’d always tried to help it live, but water was heavy, and it was so far away from the fucking hose.

Stupid.

We sold the house for something like 80k. We each got 40k, essentially handed over to us before we learned about taxes, savings, cost-of-living, and before I, at least, believed I’d survive.

It felt like too huge an amount of money to spend in a lifetime. A normal lifespan, much less mine.

Years went by. Jobs started, hopeful careers born in my mind, this is what I’ll do, who I’ll be, and then quickly aborted before they could breathe on their own.

The money was a mysterious entity, too far into what I didn’t understand to see. I ordered a lot of takeout. I didn’t ask about it; my dad handled it. In a broken way, yet still a way, I began to heal.

When I saw the bright yellow Ford Escape, I was excited. It was the kind of car someone who was going to live would have.

It cost 8k. I shot off a quick email to my dad, requesting the funds from my account. He called me less than an hour later and said, “This will, just so you know, essentially be the last of what’s left for you.”

The world stilled. I shook it off. I wanted the car.

I got it, and I got ten thousand tiny flower stickers, and I covered the inside with a garden of pastel and jewel tones. I smoked cigarettes and put them out in the cupholder, terrified of getting pulled over for littering or seen smoking at all, really. Her ghost followed me, sour and judging, quite unlike she’d been alive.

The car was named Videlia at first. Yellow onion, layered, perfect. The man who’d do the most work on her named her the Yellow Submarine, though, and this is what he called her when he called me and told me the price of fixing her, four years later.

It wasn’t even that much, looking back. 1200 or something. It might as well have been another 8k, though. I’d lived smaller than I was used to, and my lifestyle hadn’t caught up to my lack of funds, and the number felt like death because I expected it.

Of course she would die.

I sold Videlia online for $800, and moved on numb, and on foot.