My brother returned after twenty years, claiming half of our childhood home. But he didn’t know that all this time, our father had been paralyzed from the waist down, and I had taken care of him alone, saving every penny for doctors.

“Michael, we are blood brothers, and this house belongs to both of us,” said John, slapping his palm on the cherry wood table that our father had built before I was even born. “I want half of it, as is fair and legal.”

We were standing in the kitchen of the house where I was born and where I had grown old. At sixty-two, I felt like I was trapped in a bad dream. John, my younger brother by three years, had left for the city right after serving in the military.

He had visited maybe ten times in twenty years—on Easter, Christmas, and once when our father had fallen from a tree and broken his leg. Each time, he stayed for two days and then disappeared back into his city life, leaving me and our parents to handle the farm, the sicknesses of old age, the loneliness.

“Have you forgotten that you once said you didn’t care about this place anymore?” I replied, trying to steady my trembling hands. “When Mom begged you to come and stay with Dad in the hospital, you said you were too busy with work.”

Mom had passed away five years ago, and Dad had followed last winter. For eight months, he had been bedridden, paralyzed after a stroke. For eight months, I had bathed him, fed him, changed his sheets, and kept him company on nights when he couldn’t sleep. John had come for the funeral and then disappeared again. Now, after reading the will, he was back, demanding his “rights.”

“Look,” he continued, pulling a document from his briefcase, “Dad left the house to both of us, in equal shares. No matter how much you try to argue, that’s the reality.”

It was true. Our father, a fair and God-fearing man, had divided everything equally between us—the house, the garden, and the small orchard behind it. But some things can’t be written in a will—the daily sacrifices, the sleepless nights, the years I had given up my own life to ensure theirs ended with dignity.

“Do you even know how much it cost to repair the roof after the storm three years ago?” I asked. “Do you know how much the doctors and medicine cost for Dad in his final year? Did you send even a single dollar for that, John?”

He hadn’t. He had an apartment in the city, a wife who was a teacher, two kids in college. He lacked nothing, but he gave nothing. In all these years, he had built a life far from this town, while I had stayed behind to guard the roots he had abandoned.

“Did you ever think of coming to stay with our parents? Of giving them a glass of water when they were thirsty? Of washing their clothes? Of bringing in firewood?”

He was silent. His eyes wandered through the old kitchen, stopping on things that likely stirred memories—the cast-iron stove where Mom baked bread, the small mirror where Dad shaved on Sundays, the Virgin Mary icon in the eastern corner of the room.

In small towns, inheritance means more than just legal documents. A childhood home is not just walls and a roof—it is the keeper of memories, sacrifices, continuity. In these simple rooms, generations were born, lived, and died.

“John, you don’t understand,” I tried to explain. “I have no claim to your city apartment, even though I contributed when Dad sold his oxen to help you pay for it. I never asked for anything. But this house… I maintained this house. I put on a new roof, replaced the windows, installed running water in the kitchen so Mom wouldn’t have to carry buckets from the well in her old age.”

He shrugged, as if none of that mattered.

“No one asked you to do that, Michael. You did it because you wanted to stay here. I chose something different.”

He pulled out an expensive pack of cigarettes and lit one, even though he knew no one had ever smoked in this house. Dad had asthma, and the smell of tobacco had always suffocated him.

“Here’s the deal,” he continued, blowing smoke toward the ceiling, stained from years of cooking fires. “I don’t want to live here. You can stay. But I want half the house’s value. It’s my right.”

When one brother leaves and the other stays, who is the true heir to the family home? The one who holds the legal papers, or the one who carries the house in his heart? Can a debt to one’s parents be measured in money, or are there sacrifices that can never be repaid?

I stood up from the table and looked through the small window toward the back garden, where the little apple tree Dad had planted when John was born still bore fruit every autumn. How many of those apples had my brother seen in the last twenty years?

“I can’t give you half the house’s value,” I told him simply. “I don’t have that kind of money. You know my small pension barely gets me through the month.”

He crushed his cigarette in a clean plate and looked at me with those same eyes that had once begged me to protect him from bullies in town.

“Then we’ll have to sell the house and split the money. It’s that simple.”

His words hit me like an axe. Sell the house? The house where Mom had baked bread for fifty years? The house where Dad had raised his children and spent his final days? The house where every creaking floorboard and every crack in the wall told a story?

“To whom?” I whispered. “Who would buy it? Half the houses in town are abandoned.”

“There are city folks looking for vacation homes,” he said with a salesman’s smile. “I even know a guy who’s interested. He’s offering a good price.”

A vacation home. Our parents’ home, the place where we were born and raised, reduced to nothing more than a weekend retreat for strangers.

“And where would I go?” I asked.

He shrugged again, that same indifferent gesture that told me exactly how little he cared.

“Buy something smaller with your share. Or move to the city. We’ll find you something.”

Move to the city. Me, who only knew how to live here, among trees and birds and neighbors I had known my whole life. Me, who couldn’t sleep without the sound of crickets at night and who woke up with the roosters every morning.

I opened the pantry door and motioned for him to follow. Inside, on the shelves, sat jars of jam that Mom had made the year before she passed away.

“This is the last cherry jam Mom ever made,” I said, pointing to a dusty jar. “I never opened it. I keep it for when I miss her.”

John looked at the jar, then at me, and for a moment, I saw something in his eyes—a shadow, hesitation.

“Michael, don’t make this more complicated than it is. It’s just an old house.”

“To you, maybe. To me, it’s my whole life.”

We stepped outside, where the old walnut tree our grandfather had planted stretched its branches over the well. My dog, Rusty, came up wagging his tail, unaware that the stranger in front of him was actually family.

“Do you remember when we climbed that tree and fell into the well?” I asked. “Dad saved us, then gave us such a spanking we couldn’t sit for a week.”

He smiled despite himself.

“Yeah… and then Mom hid us in the attic and brought us warm milk with honey.”

For a moment, we were kids again—brothers who had once shared everything, from clothes to secrets.

“John,” I said quietly, “beyond papers and laws, this house is our parents’ soul. You can’t sell souls.”

He turned toward his fancy car parked by the old wooden gate, then back to me.

“You have three months to decide,” he said, opening the door. “Either you pay me half, or we sell. There’s no other way.”

After he left, I sat on the porch, the same place where Dad had once sat, telling stories of the war.

How do you put a price on a house built with sacrifices? What value do memories, tears, joys, and pains hold within these walls? How do you split a soul in two?