Time to look through mom’s papers.

You unlock the door to your Mom’s apartment and slide the keys into the pocket of your jacket. The Endion neighborhood is on the east side of Chester Park, and bordered on the south by Lake Superior. Mom’s place is a south facing third story walk-up on East 4th. St, only a 4 block walk from the hospital. It’s pretty low rent, but it’s got the advantage of not being a part of East Hillside, which is probably the second worst area in Duluth.

Duluth isn’t the idyllic town you grew up in anymore. U. S. Steel’s failure during the eighties sent the economy into a tailspin, and while the ports have left it in better shape than the Rust Belt area to the east, a serious brain trust in the early nineties decided to turn the full focus on tourism. While some towns like Pittsburgh and Cleveland have managed a mostly seamless transition to the service industry, Duluth is still having growing pains.

The apartment is small. One bedroom, a lavatory with only a bathtub, a small living area, and a kitchen that barely qualifies for the title. You know for a fact that mom paid $900 a month for it, which in your opinion is far more criminal than anything you’ve ever done.

Beth collapses on the couch; from the looks of it she’s in shock. You head into the kitchen and start a pot of coffee, then make your way to mom’s room and start rifling through her closet. There are a lot of phone calls to make, but they’ll wait til tomorrow. Right now you need answers.

It’s there, on the top shelf of the closet. A cardboard bank box stuffed with papers. This is gonna be a grind, but part of what makes you good at what you do is an eye for detail and an extremely high resistance to boredom. You bring the box to the living room and plunk it down on the IKEA coffee table. Back to the kitchen for coffee with a generous splash of Bushmill’s in yours and cream and sugar in Beth’s. You return and sit down next to your half sister.

“I’m here for you, hon. We’ll get through this together.” She snuggles up next to you, and you wrap an arm around her. Just like when you were kids, but back then Beth was an annoying little brat and you were an awkward preteen. You’re both adults now, and while you’ve been aware of your sister as a sexual being since she turned twelve, you’ve avoided prolonged physical contact with her since then as well; you realized early on that a teenage boy can get just as horny for his sister as the girl next door, and his sister is closer and probably more willing. You close your eyes and think of nuns and dead rats until your awkward erection fades.

The soft snoring sounds coming from Beth alert you to the fact that she’s dozed off, and you gently disentangle and lay her down on the couch. Time to start on the papers.

Two hours later you’ve had three revelations. The first is that Mom was a packrat. This isn’t a bad thing; you have quite a paper trail. There are receipts going back decades, old stereo manuals, everything. None of it even remotely organized. The second thing is that you probably need reading glasses. The final thing is that there aren’t two birth certificates in the box. There are six.