Did you know that I have a sister? A lot of people don’t. She usually doesn’t come up unless I’m asked directly. “Do you have any siblings?” My answer is, usually, “I have a half sister but we’re estranged.” I don’t know if estranged is the right word but how do you convey that you don’t really know someone and you don’t really speak?

We weren’t raised together. My friends from childhood would be surprised when I mentioned that I had a sister. One time my friend Risa said, “Rob, I don’t believe you have a sister.” If I were her, I might not, either.

She’s thirteen years older than I am. I don’t know where she lives. I know it’s in Pennsylvania. I went to her wedding eight or nine years ago. It was right after my parents died.

“Sorry about Bob and Jene,” she said.

“Thanks.”

That’s about as involved as she got in their deaths. I don’t blame her. My father wasn’t her father and she and our mother did not get along.

“Did not get along” is an understatement. I once saw my sister literally spit in my mother’s face. Another time, I watched her grab my mother by the hair and violently shake her head. After it was over, my mother was shaking with pieces of her own hair in her hands.

There’s a lot here, a lot of it I don’t even know. I don’t know what my mother’s life was like right after my sister was born. I don’t know how my sister came to live with my grandmother. I don’t know what her childhood was like. Sometimes my family speaks to me about her as if I know details that I don’t.

The other way that I describe her is that she’s the Julian Lennon and I’m the Sean. I was the golden boy who got everything he wanted for Christmas, who got to go to private school, college. “But Robby’s so bright,” my mother would say over the phone when comparing us. Yeah, Robby has two attentive parents that make sure he does his homework.

There’s a lot. There’s a lot of history, a lot ways that people should have acted, a lot of ways that people did act, none of it nice and tidy in its assignment of blame.

She reached out to me a couple of times. She wrote me a letter once. She invited me to her wedding. I never wrote back or made an effort to know her. Sometimes I think I should. Other times I remember how scared I was of her when I was a kid.

There was one time, though, when I was around thirteen. I was still collecting baseball cards. My family and I were in Pennsylvania at my grandmother’s. I might have been Thanksgiving weekend. My sister was in good standing with everyone and I went out with her to run an errand, I forget what. I know that I wanted to pick up some baseball cards.

She was cool to me. She didn’t have to be. I would have hate me if I were her, spoiled little shit that I am. But we talked like equals that night. “I like your dad,” she told me. I thought that was cool.

We found a convenience store that had cards and I picked up a few packs. “Which ones do you like?” She asked. “Eh, all of them, I guess.”

When we got home, she reached into her purse and handed me one more pack that she bought when I wasn’t looking.

It was only a pack of baseball cards but to this day I remember is how kind it was.

None of this can really explain all of my feelings about her but I guess I just wanted to write about her, to mention her, to let you know she exists.