Dan needed to leave. He needed to go home and get ready for his Friday classes. When he said he’d brought his toothbrush with him, he was lying. He hadn’t anticipated spending the night at all. I told him about the delivery of the death certificate but not the feelings it evoked inside me. I didn’t have to. Dan read my moods as easily as stepping outside to see whether it was night or day.
“What would your mom want you to do?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Would she want you to keep delaying things? Or would she want her estate wrapped up as quickly as possible?”
I knew the answer. When Dan was gone, I called the lawyer. Mr. Allison had an appointment available that afternoon, after I was done with school.
I agreed to it. Then I got ready and left for campus.
Chapter Twenty-four
I arrived right on time for my four-thirty appointment with the lawyer. The school day had passed uneventfully. I faced my class and told them once again that I didn’t have their essays graded. They grumbled a little, and I realized that the shelf life of students giving their teacher a break because the teacher’s mother had been murdered was getting shorter and shorter. Moving on with the estate business and putting everything to rest would be good, for my own psyche and for my professional career. I couldn’t do much of anything about Ronnie, but I could take care of the things I still had some measure of control over.
Mr. Allison’s elderly secretary, her hair pulled into a tight bun, told me to wait, so I sat in an uncomfortable leather chair. I didn’t read any of the magazines or play with my phone. Instead, I watched the secretary at her desk. She looked to be my mother’s age or older, and I silently questioned the universe, asking it why this woman lived while my mother was gone. My anger grew—a slow churning in my chest—and I knew I had started down an unproductive and hurtful mental path. Just to distract myself, I picked up the first magazine I could reach, a copy of Sports Illustrated with a hulking football player on the cover. I flipped through it, past ads to help men with erectile dysfunction and high cholesterol. The phone on the secretary’s desk buzzed, and she stood up and asked me to follow her.
I had never met Mom’s lawyer. I knew that when Dad died everything had gone to Mom. It wasn’t much. The house, the car, and a life insurance policy. Mom kept information about her finances to herself, so I never knew how much the life insurance policy paid out. Mom certainly didn’t change her lifestyle once Dad was gone, so I assumed that the money sat in a bank account somewhere accumulating a safe, steady return.
Frank Allison waited for me just inside his office door. He had a broad face and thinning white hair, which he combed back. His cheeks were a little ruddy, as if he’d just been out in a cold wind, and he wore a white shirt, dark tie, and suspenders. He shook my hand when I came in and offered his condolences while he guided me to a seat. He was over six feet tall and built solidly, and when he sat down behind the desk he let out a little grunt as though the very act of returning his butt to the chair required a lot of effort. The secretary closed the door when she left.
“I know this is a difficult time,” Frank Allison said. “But you’re smart to get the ball rolling on this.” He pulled out a pair of rimless glasses and set them on the end of his nose. “This death business can be a little like getting nibbled to death by ducks, but my job is to help you get through it.”
“Thanks.”
“We’ll get this all square for you in a couple of shakes.”
Before I’d entered his office, I wouldn’t have believed folksiness could be a cure for anything, but just a few minutes in the presence of Frank Allison, and I started to calm down. It didn’t hurt that the wall behind him was covered with pictures of his children and grandchildren and even one of Mr. Allison himself in a Santa suit, the beard pulled down to reveal his smiling face.
“I have a copy of the will,” I said. “It was in among Mom’s personal effects when she died.”
“Your mother was very practical,” he said, spreading some papers out on his desk. “She didn’t want to burden her children with anything, so she tried to make it easy. You have the death certificate, right?”
I handed it over. Mr. Allison studied it, his lips pressed together. He shook his head.
“I just don’t know where we’re headed when these kinds of things happen,” he said, tapping the certificate with a big finger. “Your mother was a nice lady, very warm.”
He looked up at me and smiled, his lips spreading across his broad face.
“Thank you,” I said. No one had ever described my mother as warm, but I knew he was trying to be nice, so I accepted it. Superficial comments were welcome, even encouraged.
Mr. Allison lifted a packet of papers backed by a light blue piece of cardboard. “Here’s the will,” he said, handing it over to me. “It’s all pretty cut-and-dried. I’ll give you a moment to look it over if you’d like.”
“I already have one,” I said, holding up the papers.
“Oh, that’s right. You did say that.” He adjusted his glasses. “Well, you don’t have to doubt those were her most recent wishes. If you look at the last page, you’ll see she updated the will just about a month ago.”
I froze. “She did?”
“Indeed,” he said.
“Did she change things?” I flipped through the copy sitting in my lap and checked the date on the last page. It was old. “This one is from two years ago,” I said.
“You don’t say,” Mr. Allison said. He chuckled a little. “Well, maybe your mother has a surprise or two inside of her. Can I see that?”
“She changed it a month ago?” I asked. The volume of my voice had dropped. When I handed the copy of the will—the old will—over to Mr. Allison, my hand shook ever so slightly. It felt as if those few pages of white legal paper weighed twenty-five pounds.
“That’s right.”
A month. Right after our fight. Mr. Allison had possession of the last words my mother would ever speak to me in the form of her bequests, and I had no idea what she might have to say—if anything. Would I finally find out what she really thought about my refusal to care for Ronnie? Would she cut me out entirely?
“Is it changed a lot?” I asked.
“Oh, she rearranged the furniture a little.” He must have noticed my shakiness, because he pointed to a copy of the will on his desk, then said, “Would you like me to explain what all this means?”
“Yes, please.”
“All righty,” he said, adjusting the glasses again. He took the old will, the one I had brought, and tossed it onto the table behind him. “We don’t need that.” He picked up the new one and handed it over to me. “The first page there just says all the typical gobbledygook that we have to say. Your mom’s of sound mind and body and a resident of this county and that this will supersedes any previous will she might have made. That’s how we know this one will stand up. The latest one signed by the person is the one that counts. Everything else is null and void.”
“Okay,” I said. I took the copy of the new will and scanned the first page. The words all ran together and meant nothing to me.
“Then, on the second page there, you see that your mom directed that all of her property and assets, including any insurance policies she might have, be divided into three equal shares. Again, all pretty standard. If you go to the next page…”
But I wasn’t listening to him anymore. My eyes were stuck on the second page and the section where it named the recipients of the equal shares of Mom’s estate.
“Hold on,” I said, raising my index finger.