OBJECT: The object of the game is to become the wealthiest player through buying, renting, and selling property.

My Uncle Frank was a mean Monopoly player. I realized this around age seven or eight when the game I had previously known to last for hours with my parents turned into quick defeats opposite him. He raked my remaining money, the little I could pay towards what my final roll said I owed, and returned the white ones, baby pink fives, and pale-yellow tens into their slots on the Bank’s plastic white tray. I got up and huffily pushed my chair into the card table—where two other cousins still sat across from Uncle Frank, hands nervously fingering through their own dwindling piles of cash—and plodded out to the cabin’s front porch.  

Outside, my father was sitting in a rocking chair reading a book. 

“It’s no fair. Uncle Frank always wins,” I said, draping myself over his arm, which still held firm to his book.

“Of course. Uncle Frank cheats,” said Dad. 

I picked up my head and looked at him. “Huh?”

“He changes the rules.”

“Which rules?” I asked.

Dad shrugged. “Whichever rules he wants. It’s different every time.”

I stuck out my lower lip and slumped my shoulders in defeat. 

“Oh no!” he said in false distress, setting his book aside. “There’s a fish hook caught in your mouth!” He reached over and mimicked releasing the imaginary hook from the corner of my pitiful frown.

I groaned and gave his arm a small shove.  

“Well, don’t play with him then,” Dad said. “Or, play with him, but just know that he cheats.”

The setting for these cutthroat family board games could not have been more idyllic. Nestled in the eastern Kentucky Appalachian foothills, my maternal grandmother’s summer cottage looked out on a jewel of a lake. What was previously a forested valley with a bedrock of soapstone became Park Lake in 1904, after the well-to-do gentlemen of Fleming County pooled their resources, built a dam, and filled it with water and fish. Early solicitations billed the lake, located only a day’s wagon ride from downtown Flemingsburg, as an investment that would pay “dividends in health and pleasure” for the entire family. Instead of the men leaving for weeks-long hunting and fishing trips while their kin sweated away the summers in town, everyone could pile on the wagon and be stretching their legs at the water’s edge, bluegills kissing the tips of their toes, before sundown.

In a rare example of truth in advertising, Park Lake became for our family everything those turn-of-the-century gentlemen promised it would be: a salve for the soul that, thanks to the automobile and paved roads, became a mere thirty-minute drive from town. My grandmother bought her cabin in 1947, two years before birthing Uncle Frank and then my mother and her two younger brothers in quick succession. The five of them lived at the lake in the summers while my grandfather commuted to town each day to work at his law firm. The kids grew, married, and multiplied, as did the rooms of the cabin, and by the time I was born, Park Lake felt like a birthright.

Uncle Frank loved the lake just as much as I did, but he was not a naturally idle person. When the leisure grew too much for him, he laced up his sneakers and walked the gravel road that connected the forty cottages to each other. I watched his white University of Kentucky baseball cap as he circled the lake’s perimeter, stopping every so often to holler up to neighbors rocking on their own front porches. I heard the crunch of his feet on our cabin’s gravel driveway and the snap of the screen door before looking up to see him already standing in front of the card table where my cousins and I had congregated once again. He lifted his ball cap and ran a hand over his half-bald, glistening scalp, then set the hat upside down on the table.  

“What are we playing?” he asked with a full-toothed grin. 

I said nothing, staring instead at Uncle Frank’s cap and its yellow, sweat-stained interior.  

I knew we’d grant him admission to our table just as I knew he would win. But I was curious to watch him, now knowing that the game was rigged. I wondered how much effort was still required on his part to maintain the upper hand.

◆

THE PLAY: Starting with the Banker, each player in turn throws the dice. The player with the highest total starts the play…

In my early teens, I started piecing together that my family had “country money.” In the economic landscape of Fleming County, we were at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid, in possession of the rural trifecta of land, cash, and status. Though it would be years before I said any of this out loud, I knew that country money was different from suburban money, at least as I measured it in the northern Kentucky subdivision where my family lived. I clocked the wealth of my own classmates in the cars their parents drove—brand-new, gleaming minivans to our faux-wood paneled, used station wagon—and in the number of Guess jeans and silk button-down shirts they owned. The relevance of these markers fell away as we drove an hour and fifteen minutes southeast to my mother’s hometown. 

“Whose are you?” adults would frequently ask in Flemingsburg when they met a child at a gathering that they couldn’t quite place.

“Sidney Jane’s,” I learned to respond. Her maiden name was known without even needing to say it.  

At the Flemingsburg Christian Church, where Uncle Frank occasionally subbed when the pastor was on vacation, my grandmother had an unspoken reservation on the second pew in the center row. When all four of her children, their spouses, and eight grandchildren came into town to attend Easter Sunday service together, other families made room while our place in the sanctuary held firm. To the right of the altar was a stained-glass window of Christ standing, a serene expression on his fair-skinned, goateed face. Beside the window was a plaque memorializing my great-great grandfather Isaac McCartney, meaning that his descendants, the McCartney clan my grandmother married into, were likely among the well-to-do church members who paid for the sanctuary’s upgrade in 1896. I didn’t know all this as I sat beside my grandmother on Easter Sunday. I didn’t need to. Seeing my mother’s maiden name beside the Good Lord told me what mattered most: in this town we were collectively somebody. 

When my grandmother’s husband died in his forties of a heart attack, the regional paper covered it as a news story, not an obituary. 

 

After her husband’s death, my grandmother quit smoking and went back to work. Thanks to her parents’ radical belief in a woman’s education, she already possessed a bachelor’s and master’s in social work and years of experience working for the American Red Cross prior to getting married. Her brother Eldon, whom everyone called “Tic,” was mayor of the nearby city of Morehead and helped her get an interview for a job in the state’s local human resources office. He also schooled her on farm operations, allowing her to take over the management of the land where she and her husband had raised cattle, tobacco, and corn. 

In a way, she was treading the same path as her mother, who managed the family railroad tie business after her husband fell into a deep depression. My grandmother’s parents had been genuine millionaires in her youth. But the stock market crash of 1929 wiped out all their equity, a financial loss with which my great-grandfather could not cope. My great-grandmother stepped in to manage the business and its books for the six years it would take her husband to recover. 

This is all to say that my grandmother was raised in a house where comebacks were possible. Her husband’s death in 1964 “plunged family and his many friends into deep grief,” as the local newspaper detailed; what it did not do was sink them into poverty. My grandmother’s Community Chest of education, work experience, support from her brother, Social Security benefits from her late husband, and house that she inherited through her in-laws meant that our familial wealth was secure. 

Undergirding these advantages—but spoken of even less than our country money—was the Get-Out-of-Jail-Free white race card that never left our hands. Throughout the generations, we could play it again and again and trust that it would always be replenished. The card was so light in hand that it was easy to convince ourselves we had never reached for it in the first place. Instead, we could tell ourselves that we were just that good at playing the game.

◆

“GO”: Each time a player’s token lands on or passes over GO, whether by throwing the dice or drawing a card, the Banker pays him/her a $200 salary. 

At the end of every year, my grandmother would drive three blocks “downtown” to the Farmers Deposit Bank and purchase a two-hundred-dollar US Treasury Savings Bond for each of her grandchildren. Once back at her home, she used worn wooden clothes pins to clip them to the branches of the fifteen-foot white pine in the foyer. On Christmas Day, we each searched for the savings bond printed with our name amongst the sticky pine needles and 1940s-style ornaments that bubbled with hot liquid inside their glass candelabra tubes. I felt equal parts glee and trepidation as I reached inside the prickly branches toward my bond, pinched it between my fingertips, and carefully slid my arm back out. 

The bond was beautiful, more intricately designed than the Monopoly money we played with at Park Lake but, most importantly, inscribed with only my name. 

I galloped back into the living room, where the family was gathered for the proper gift opening that was about to commence, and waved the savings bond in my mother’s direction. Just as quickly as she took it from my hand and dropped it in her purse did its presence slip from my mind. Only decades later as an adult who needed to buy a car or pay for a trip to Europe did these accumulated savings bonds reappear in their maturity, our country money manifesting itself once again. 

◆

THE BANK:…The Bank never “goes broke.” 

For all the wealth in which my mother was reared, she retained an important lesson from watching her mother survive the death of a spouse: family assets were all well and good, but a woman’s hands were tied if she could not make a living on her own. The Bank may never go broke, but a single mother could. The fact that my grandmother was able to find full-time employment with the state after my grandfather’s passing meant she and her kids had benefits and a modest inflow of cash instead of a steady drip out. 

When my mother enrolled at the University of Kentucky in the late 1960s, she endeavored to get a business degree but was pressured by her academic advisor to get a bachelor’s in home economics instead. She and her classmates hosted four-course dinners as part of their class assignments, lined the entree and salad fork to the left and dinner knife and soup spoon to the right, and watched college administrators—their guests—enjoy themselves. My mother took pride in her domestic prowess but also squeezed in as many business electives as her courseload would allow. She bided her time.

By the mid-1970s, the admissions staff at Xavier University in Cincinnati didn’t find a woman wanting to pursue an MBA quite as preposterous and accepted my mother into their program. After graduation, she climbed the ladder in the marketing department at Fifth Third Bank, and before long she was branding the first ATM “Jeanie Machines” and having lunch meetings with Cincinnati Reds player Johnny Bench, the bank’s celebrity spokesman. It must have been an ego boost to sit next to Bench at a restaurant’s “good table” overlooking Fountain Square as he graciously consented to each stranger’s autograph request and think: If only they could see me now.

The sentiment likely did not repeat after my mother birthed me, returned to work after a six-week maternity leave and two-week “vacation,” and found herself hand-pumping breast milk in an office closet in between meetings. My carpal tunnel flares just thinking of it now. 

You can be winning at the game, collecting Fifth Third stock equity alongside your regular paycheck as my mother was, and find once again that the rules have been written to intentionally slow your progress around the board. The victor in Monopoly is the wealthiest player, but in the corporate and collegiate world it isn’t that simple. Intellect, family connections, and shared whiteness aren’t quite enough to supplant him—the image in the game makers’ minds of what a real winner looks like. 

◆

BUYING PROPERTY: Whenever you land on an unowned property you may buy that property from the Bank at its printed price. 

When I was thirteen, my grandmother paid to fly all sixteen of her kin to Breckenridge, Colorado, for a family ski trip. Uncle Frank, an avid skier, swooshed past my father and me on the wide slopes, flashing a broad smile that was 99% wholesome glee and only 1% showing off. By the time Dad and I reached the bottom of the run, Uncle Frank had already taken the ski lift halfway back up the mountain. 

A man my father’s age who was skiing solo asked if he could join our four-seat. After the lift scooped us up and we pulled the crossbar down, resting our skis on its attached footrest, the man and my father began exchanging pleasantries.  

“Where are you all from?” the man asked.

“Cincinnati,” Dad said without hesitation. 

The conversation carried forward between the two of them while I swung back and forth on the answer my father had given. 

Hadn’t I heard him answer this question before? He always said: “We’re from northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.” Why, on this five-minute lift ride, in which there was plenty of airtime to fill, had he chosen to abbreviate his answer to the point that in my heart I felt like an impostor? 

Every aunt and uncle on both sides of my family had attended either the University of Kentucky or a regional Kentucky college. On the first Saturday of May each year, my mother donned a wide-brimmed hat before walking two doors down to go to our neighbor’s Kentucky Derby party. Sure, we watched the Cincinnati TV channels and read the Cincinnati newspapers, but our subscription came with the Kentucky insert as well. When we had flown to Colorado, we left from the Cincinnati airport, which was actually located ten minutes from my house. Its call letters—CVG—stood for Covington, Kentucky. I kept debating the veracity of my father’s answer, never considering that sometimes the dividing line only matters to the people living right on it.

In Monopoly, Kentucky Avenue is just over halfway around the board and charges a commensurate rent to its middle-of-the-pack placement—$18 undeveloped and $1,050 with a hotel. Paired with Indiana and Illinois Avenues to create the red property group, it is the essence of respectability. Not too big for its britches like Park Place and Boardwalk, but not piddly like Baltic Avenue either. 

That day on the ski slopes of Breckenridge, as my father and I slid our skis out from the footrest, lifted the safety bar, and prepared to make our exit at the top of the mountain, I began to worry that I was actually the resident of a cheap property. One you might not claim as home unless push came to shove.  

◆

PAYING RENT: When you land on property owned by another player, the owner collects rent from you in accordance with the list printed on its Title Deed card.

My father grew up looking at Cincinnati, the glittering Queen City, from the Kentucky side. “We were river rats,” he always said when describing his childhood in the working-class community and sundown town of Ludlow. Then he often crowed, “I married up,” which was true on many levels. In addition to the stability my mother’s inherited wealth afforded, she also offered him honest-to-goodness true love. Where his parents’ affection was muddied and conditional, entirely dependent on what he could do for them, my mother often described my father as her best friend. 

Owing that my mother had been “raised better,” my father let her cast the deciding vote on all matters involving us kids, save one. 

“When you’re eighteen, you have to move out!” He repeated this refrain every time he saw the adult children coming and going from our neighbor’s house. Though we lived in the suburbs of Villa Hills, one mile inland from the Ohio River, the neighbor was a childhood friend Dad knew from Ludlow. He was distressed at the thought that his long days working as an attorney, as well as my mother’s own years at Fifth Third Bank and later at home, might be rewarded with kids who never moved out. What was the point of climbing up if the nest you built was so comfortable that your children couldn’t bring themselves to leave? 

◆

“CHANCE” AND “COMMUNITY CHEST”: When you land on either of these spaces, take the top card from the deck indicated, follow the instructions, and return the card facedown to the bottom of the deck…

The summer after my sophomore year of high school, my mother and I took a side trip to Duke on the way to spend a week with Uncle Frank and the rest of the family in South Carolina. Though our arrival most certainly started in a parking lot, I felt as if I had wandered into an enchanted wood. The lush foliage and stone buildings mesmerized me. Unlike the ever-expanding University of Kentucky campus overlaid onto the streets and thoroughfares of Lexington, Duke’s campus looked like a European town square that had been dropped in the middle of a forest.

Our student tour guide was a handsome white guy with a swoop of light brown hair on top of his head, close-trimmed on the sides, wearing a collared polo shirt. Contrary to his pretty-boy appearance, everything about him felt unaffected and genuine. His smile radiated without an ounce of cheese and his voice boomed all the way to parents and prospective students in the back row without ever giving way to yelling. He wove humorous asides into his tales of campus lore, and within minutes of following him on student footpaths under a sun-pricked canopy, everyone was under his spell. 

My mother leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I would let you date him if you came here.” 

I looked at her, amazed that she thought her permission was the only thing standing between his and my love. I clearly understood my dating prospects as a studious high schooler and competitive swimmer who shuttled exclusively between the classroom and pool in athletic tees and a chlorinated ponytail. What I did not understand was how our tour guide had mastered the game: gaining admittance to an elite college, becoming their poster child, and acquiring a self-assurance I only dreamed about. 

 

When we returned home, Dad and I leafed through Duke’s brochure while sitting on our golden living room couch, the one on which my late maternal grandfather used to nap since it fit his entire six-foot-two frame. 

“You know, Duke’s tuition plus room and board is about thirty-thousand dollars,” said Dad. He flipped farther back in my brochure and pointed to numbers buried on one of the second-to-last pages.

I shrugged as if to say, “So?” As best I could tell, it sounded like a college education cost less than a house but more than the yearly fees for the club swim team I was on.

“I don’t know if we could afford that.”

I puzzled over this in the days afterward, and Duke’s brochure slowly moved down the growing stack from schools that were similarly out of reach. 

The University of Kentucky made me an offer of admission but said I was ten points shy of their minimum SAT score in order to be in their Honors program. I was forlorn at the thought that, even with the benefit of Advanced Placement classes, I would be starting in the same place as my parents three decades prior. 

When the swim coach of Transylvania University in Lexington called to offer me a swimming scholarship, I felt the burnt orange Chance card slide towards me across the board. My mother had saved much of the money my grandmother had gifted her over the years, amassing enough that, provided we kids could keep our net tuition in line with in-state totals, we could graduate debt-free. Just as I could not conceive of the cost of college, I could neither appreciate the advantage of leaving a liberal arts college with a degree in Spanish without a cent of debt to my name.

◆

“FREE PARKING”: …A player landing on this place does not receive any money, property or reward of any kind. This is just a “free” resting place.

Yale Divinity School offered me one of their coveted full-tuition scholarships in recognition of my achievements at Transylvania University and promise as a wannabe scholar of Latin American art and religion. I gleefully accepted its offer and felt the rush of air as I finally catapulted past what either of my parents had academically achieved. 

I loved everything about Yale’s micro-urban campus that burst into fiery orange as fall’s cool temperatures descended. I loved how Duke paled in comparison to Yale’s lore, which included a rare book library that could shoot itself into the ground in case of nuclear Armageddon, and secret societies that included multiple past US presidents on their member rolls. I loved everything except my courses, which required me to write lengthy papers in which I could only posit an opinion through existing scholarship, an intellectual puppet show for which I had no aptitude or patience. 

“What GPA do I need to keep my scholarship?” I asked the Divinity School’s admissions assistant, who had pulled up my account on her computer. 

“You just need to pass,” she said. In grad school, this meant any mixture of A’s and B’s.

I can do that, I thought as relief washed over me. I could already tell from the marks I’d received on my first papers in Early Christian Theology and Old Testament 101 that obtaining a perfect row of A’s would require pooling every resource of time and mental acuity available to me. But an A- or B+? Those were like fish I could catch in my sleep. 

I called my parents and came clean. I had no idea what I wanted to do after Yale, but I wondered aloud whether I could take the two years of my master’s program to figure it out.

“A degree from Yale never hurt anyone,” said Dad. My mother agreed and said they would still cover the cost of my rent if I worked to cover my expenses. The country money had not run out.

And so began two years of leisure, the best times of which were spent with my exceedingly bright and earnest friends drinking free Miller High Lifes at the all-Yale grad school pub on Thursday nights. We shot pool in the basement, opened the dance floor as soon as the DJ began spinning upstairs, and rubbed elbows with the fancier Yalies from the Law and Business Schools. We drunkenly yell-whispered secrets to each other, revealed the identity of the current crush pressing against our hearts, and felt adulthood somehow inch farther away instead of closer with each passing night.

But it came anyway, and a year earlier for me than the rest of my cohort. Most of my female friends planned to seek ordination in their respective protestant denominations, which required a three-year Master of Divinity. Those with doctoral or alternate career paths all opted to tack on an additional year of coursework to their two-year programs. I didn’t have any greater sense of professional direction than the day I walked into the admissions office. I couldn’t imagine trying to convince them that I needed an extra year of study on Yale’s dime. On Commencement Day, I looked up and down the rows and my fellow black-robbed Divinity School graduates, some with homemade golden pipe-cleaner halos decorating their mortarboards, and barely recognized a single face. 

I moved into a studio in downtown New Haven, though my father questioned whether it made sense to sign a lease when unemployed. But my mother gave her blessing for me to dip into my reservoir of graduation gift money and Christmas tree savings bonds to keep me afloat until I found steady work. None of my student worker jobs at the Art and Architecture Library, Peabody Museum of Natural History, or Yale Divinity School daycare had led to any full-time opportunities. I checked out books from the New Haven Public Library like What Color Is Your Parachute? and turned the final page no closer to the answer. I felt like I had reached my apex life achievement and, rather than gliding down to make a soft landing onto professional terrain, had stumbled backward off the peak and was now free falling. 

This sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach was not new to me, and I knew well enough to make an appointment with a psychologist at the Yale Student Health Services and tell the soft-spoken, middle-aged man that I thought I was depressed. He didn’t look surprised. With a client roster of high achievers, Commencement may have been his busy season. He reminded me that the student health insurance plan continued for three months post-graduation, and we could meet weekly if necessary until then. I booked my standing appointment with the front desk and then walked past all the other students waiting for their session, everyone averting their eyes lest they accidentally see or be seen by a classmate. 

I had a deadline. By the end of summer, I would secure my first real job and my mental state.

 

A couple of weeks later, feeling worse instead of better, my therapist suggested seeing the psychiatrist on staff as well. The young woman with straight, sandy-blonde hair prescribed an anti-depressant but told me to be patient. It would be weeks before the medicine would fully kick in.

At my light-filled studio apartment, I scrolled university job boards for administrative positions for hours each day—working in higher education was the only profession I could imagine being remotely qualified for—and then closed my laptop, turned on the TV, and slid down off my brown armchair and onto the fuzzy white rug. I stretched out my legs, laid back on a small pillow, and cradled my head in my hands. I was ready to watch Lance Armstrong peddle up mountains. 

In the summer of 2005, Armstrong was seeking his seventh consecutive Tour de France victory. I loved watching Armstrong sweat, grind, and win. The play-by-play announcers schooled me on the overall race strategy, how Armstrong’s team worked together to protect him and take the brunt of a mountain climb so he could preserve his strength for the final push toward the finish line. Being an American broadcast, Armstrong was the de facto home team, meaning the announcers didn’t even reference suspicions among other country’s teams that the man in the yellow jersey was cheating somehow.

 

Over the next few weeks, as I watched Armstrong bullet through time trials and slingshot through a series of small French towns, I felt both better and worse. The blanket of sadness didn’t feel quite as heavy as before, but I was newly unable to sleep through the night. I blamed this on the trio of high windows that let the light from the street lamps eek in through the Venetian blinds all night long. I didn’t know that the medicine the psychiatrist had prescribed was seesawing my brain chemistry, bringing the depression down but the anxiety up. 

Days after Armstrong stood atop the podium before the Arc de Triomphe, bouquet held aloft in one hand and the Tour’s mascot stuffed lion in the other, I began daydreaming of slitting my wrists. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to die, but that the anxiety had become an electric current I could feel coursing through my veins. I needed to find a way to stop its pulse. 

Instead of reaching for a razor, I grabbed my cell phone and speed-dialed my mother, who flew up to Connecticut the next day. She sat in the waiting room of the student health clinic while I met with the psychiatrist again. When I couldn’t promise not to harm myself, the psychiatrist called an ambulance to transport me to the Yale New Haven Hospital’s psychiatric ward. I sat upright on the stretcher, my mother and an EMT on either side of me, as the ambulance drove slowly through the city’s bustling but diminutive downtown. I took in every street I thought I knew so well, but now from the vantage of the ambulance’s two square rear windows.

My fellow patients in the psychiatric ward frightened me with their erratic behavior; but the thought that I was their peer, that each of our minds was beholden to forces beyond our control, scared me more. I was grateful to be given a room to myself that first night, the other bed temporarily unoccupied. A nurse came in shortly before lights out and handed me pills in a small plastic cup, which I tossed back without complaint. After she left, I pulled the bedsheet and lone blanket up over me and let the drugs pull me down into a heavy, dreamless sleep. 

A day later my mother sat beside me in the office of the gray-haired attending psychiatrist, who smiled at both of us reassuringly from across his desk. This wasn’t his first post-Commencement season either. He had already taken me off the ill-fitting anti-depressant and suggested I might be discharged within the week if my suicidal thoughts dissipated and my mother and I developed a multi-layered backup plan. He said I needed the security of knowing what would happen if I couldn’t find a job. I needed a free resting place where I could go if I couldn’t make rent on my own.

“She can move back home,” Mom said without hesitation. 

“What about Dad?” I asked. It was an option I hadn’t even allowed myself to consider. 

My mother called my father afterward, who immediately agreed that I could move back home if I needed to. Eighteen had been more of a target deadline than a hard and fast rule. Free parking was always available. This was not evidence of our country money, even if it surely helped fund the purchase of our house. It was just plain love. Something the Bank is never in control of doling out.

◆

SELLING PROPERTY:…Houses and hotels may be sold back to the Bank at any time for one-half the price paid for them. 

I sat on the second step of the grand staircase that wound up my maternal grandmother’s foyer. It was the staircase that had framed the white-pine Christmas tree with its not-up-to-code, bubbling candelabra ornaments and that had held my mother, father, and their ruffled bridal party as they posed for pictures in the 1970s before heading over four blocks to get married at the Flemingsburg Christian Church. Now, the staircase was clear, save for me. Boxes and plastic tubs overflowing with papers and miscellany littered the foyer’s floor. 

My cousin Rachael, Uncle Frank’s eldest daughter, sat near the opening of the darkened first-floor hallway that led to the back half of the house. Another cousin who also had stayed after the funeral sat nearer the front door. We each dipped our hands into the box beside us and sorted through the contents of Uncle Frank and Aunt Marsha’s lives. 

 

Aunt Marsha had received her cancer diagnosis first but died second. Two stem cell transplants and rounds of chemotherapy allowed her to live six years with bone cancer. But Uncle Frank’s stomach cancer was much farther along when the doctors found it, and in one year’s time he was gone. My cousin Rachael lost her father at sixty-eight and her mother at seventy and, to cap off these many difficult years, gained at the end an unmitigated mess as the executrix of their estate.

The foyer was just the start of it. Uncle Frank and Aunt Marsha had purchased my grandmother’s house after she died at age ninety-four but still retained three storage units full of “stuff”—a term I’m using generously here—as well as their longtime farmhouse just outside city limits. The most valuable things I found in the post-mortem sort were teenage love letters from Aunt Marsha to Uncle Frank. I knew Uncle Frank’s letters to her were also somewhere in this house. But I almost didn’t need them. I could already hear his words like a call-and-response to Aunt Marsha’s declarations of love, vents of frustration, and notes of encouragement. 

Reading these heartfelt and occasionally irritable letters reminded me of my own weird mixture of annoyance and love for Uncle Frank. In addition to his Monopoly thievery, he wouldn’t let anyone sit and read a book in peace on the porch at Park Lake. It was almost as if the clarity of your attention to words on the page prompted him to urgently need to ask you a question—any question—right at that moment. He often only listened halfway through your answer before responding with another question. He avoided any domestic task as if he was repelled from it by oppositional magnetic force. I had never seen him wash a dish or prepare a meal. 

As a college student steeping in feminist literature and gender politics courses, my blood boiled over one summer evening as Rachael and I cleared the Park Lake dinner table and prepared to take our turn among the cousins washing and rinsing dishes in the two sink basins while using water judiciously from the cabin’s underground tank. I had always loathed the way washing dishes made me feel as if I was soaking my hands in a soup of the family’s leftover half-chewed food.

“Maybe tomorrow Uncle Frank should wash the dishes,” I said, looking right at him as family members scooted in their chairs. Uncle Frank pretended not to hear me and walked out of the kitchen and onto the porch. 

I didn’t expect that in death I would miss him terribly. The boom of his rough-edged baritone that I could pick out from the choir loft as I sat in my grandmother’s second-row pew. How he wrung his hands as he explained to me the difficulty he had in deciding child custody cases in his late-stage career as a Kentucky District Judge, how he always wanted to see families kept together even though his own family had been made complete by adding a second daughter through adoption. The way he called our hillbilly names like a race track announcer as soon as he spied us on the front porch at Park Lake—Amye Rebecca becoming “Amye Reba” and my youngest brother, Robert Joel, becoming “Bobby Jo.” How when naming my own children, I tested the options by imagining whether or not I could hear Uncle Frank’s voice hollering their name, calling the next generation home. 

 

In death, the family learned that my grandmother’s house was just one of many properties that Uncle Frank and Aunt Marsha owned. My mother and her two other brothers likely had some sense of the properties the pair had accumulated, which is why they didn’t mind Uncle Frank buying them out so he alone could inherit my grandmother’s home. Why not add one more property card to an already flush hand? Still, the volume astounded me. Two plots of Fleming County farmland, a North Carolina mountainside track, one rundown rental home, partial ownership in two South Carolina beach condos, a half-renovated home on the Kentucky historic register, and their main farmhouse that for the past several years had been occupied primarily by bees. None of the individual properties had an especially high value and many were money pits that Rachael realized needed to be unloaded quickly before next year’s taxes came due.

The Monopoly rules aren’t far off. Taken as a whole, Uncle Frank and Aunt Marsha’s descendants likely earned back half the price originally paid, which, to be sure, isn’t nothing. But witnessing my cousin Rachael’s time of mourning get consumed by the business of the estate—watching her spend the better half of a year flying back home to Kentucky again and again, sorting through hoarded assets, and calling insurance companies and attorneys on every lunch break—was like discovering that the green houses lining the Monopoly board are actually empty inside. 

When you are accumulating them during the game you know that. You can feel the space when your fingertip presses into its hollow underside, flesh pushing into each sharp corner. But it is another thing entirely to watch the end of another player’s game and see each house flipped over one by one.

The Bank would rather we didn’t dwell on this. Look at your own fine stack of mint-green twenties and your five-hundred-dollar bill the same shade as a ripe tangerine, it beckons. Admire the cherry red of the new hotel you just constructed on Marvin Gardens at great expense. Do not consider what is empty on the inside. Do not ponder what has been hollowed out through the means by which it was acquired. Above all, do not reflect on what you have always possessed that is unassailably, immutably whole. 

Note: “Classic Monopoly Rules” excerpted from Monopoly: Property Trading Game from Parker Brothers by Hasbro (2007).