As it turned out, that didn’t matter. No one wanted to celebrate after Diana’s memorial. Eureka spent the rest of the day alone in her room, staring at the ceiling, wondering when she’d find the energy to move again, having her first truly suicidal thought. It felt like weights pressing down on her, like she couldn’t get enough air.
Three months later, here she was, at the reading of Diana’s will, with no more energy. The boardroom was large and sunny. Thick-paned windows offered views of tasteless loft apartments. Eureka, Dad, Maureen, and Beau sat around one corner of the huge table. Twenty swivel seats sat empty on the other side of the room. No one else was expected but Diana’s lawyer, who was “on a call” when they arrived, according to his secretary. She placed Styrofoam cups of weak coffee in front of the family.
“Oh, honey, your roots!” Aunt Maureen winced across the table from Eureka. She blew into her coffee cup, slurped a sip.
For a moment, Eureka thought Maureen had been referring to her familial roots, the only ones Eureka cared about that day. She supposed the two were connected; the roots damaged by Diana’s death had caused the offensive, grown-out ones on her head.
Maureen was the oldest of the De Ligne children, eight years Diana’s senior. The sisters had shared the same dewy skin and wiry red hair, dimples on their shoulders, green, grainy eyes behind their glasses. Diana had inherited a truck-load more class; Maureen had gotten Sugar’s ample breasts and wore dangerously low-cut blouses to show her heirlooms off. Studying her aunt across the table, Eureka realized that the main difference between the sisters was that Eureka’s mother had been beautiful. You could look at Maureen and see Diana gone wrong. She was a cruel parody.
Eureka’s hair was damp from her shower after her run that afternoon. The team did a six-mile loop through the Evangeline woods on Thursdays, but Eureka did her own solitary loop through the university’s leafy campus.
“I can’t hardly bear to look at you.” Maureen clicked her teeth, eyeing the damp ombré hair Eureka flicked to the right, making it harder for her aunt to see her face.
“Ditto,” Eureka muttered.
“Baby, that’s not normal.” Maureen shook her head. “Please. Come by American Hairlines. I’ll give you a real good do. On the house. We’re family, aren’t we?”
Eureka looked to Dad for help. He’d drained his coffee cup and was staring into it as if he could read its dregs like tea leaves. From his expression, it didn’t look like the dregs had anything nice to predict. He hadn’t heard a word Maureen had said, and Eureka envied him.
“Can it, Mo,” Uncle Beau said to his older sister. “More important things going on than hair. We’re here about Diana.”
Eureka couldn’t help imagining Diana’s hair undulating softly underwater, like a mermaid’s, like Ophelia’s. She closed her eyes. She wanted to close her imagination, but she couldn’t.
Beau was the middle child. He’d been dashing when he was younger—dark hair and broad smile, the spitting image of his father, who, when he’d married Sugar, had acquired the nickname Sugar Daddy.
Sugar Daddy had died before Eureka was old enough to remember him, but she used to love looking at the black-and-white photos of him on Sugar’s mantel, imagining what his voice would sound like, what stories he would tell her if he were still alive.
Beau looked drained and skinny. His hair was thinning at the back. Like Diana, he didn’t have a steady job. He traveled a lot, hitchhiked most places, had once somehow met Eureka and Diana on an archaeological dig in Egypt. He’d inherited Sugar and Sugar Daddy’s small farm outside New Iberia, next to Brooks’s house. It was where Diana had stayed whenever she was in town between digs, so Eureka spent a lot of time there, too.
“How you getting on at school, Reka?” he asked.
“All right.” She was pretty sure she’d failed her calculus quiz this morning, but she’d done okay on her Earth Science test.
“Still running?”
“I’m captain this year,” she lied when Dad lifted his head. Now was not the time to divulge that she’d quit the team.
“Good for you. Your mama’s a real fast runner, too.” Beau’s voice caught and he looked away, as if he were trying to decide whether to apologize for having used the present tense in describing his sister.
The door opened and the lawyer, Mr. Fontenot, strode in, squeezing past the buffet to stand before them at the head of the table. He was a slope-shouldered man in an olive suit. It seemed impossible to Eureka that her mother could ever have met, much less hired, this man. Had she picked him out at random from the phone book? He made no eye contact, just picked up a manila folder from the table and flipped through the pages.
“I did not know Diana well.” His voice was soft and slow, and there was a little whistle in his ts. “She contacted me two weeks before her death to file this copy of her last will and testament.”
Two weeks before she died? Eureka realized that would have been the day before she and Diana flew to Florida. Was her mother working on her will while Eureka thought she was packing?
“There isn’t much here,” Fontenot said. “There was a safe-deposit box at the New Iberian Savings and Loan.” He glanced up, thick eyebrows arched, and looked around the table. “I don’t know if y’all were expecting more.”
Slight shakes of heads and murmurs. No one had expected even a safe-deposit box.
“Away we go,” Fontenot said. “To a Mr. Walter Beau De Ligne—”
“Present.” Uncle Beau raised his hand like a schoolboy who’d been held back for forty years.
Fontenot looked at Uncle Beau, then ticked off a box on the form in his hand. “Your sister Diana bequeaths to you the contents of her bank account.” He made a quick note. “Minus the monies used for funeral expenses, there is a sum total of six thousand, four hundred, and thirteen dollars. As well as this letter.” He withdrew a small white envelope with Beau’s name scrawled across it in Diana’s hand.
Eureka nearly gasped at the sight of her mother’s big-looped handwriting. She yearned to reach out and wrest the envelope from Beau’s fingers, to hold something that her mother had touched so recently. Her uncle looked stunned. He tucked the envelope into the inside pocket of his gray leather jacket and looked down at his lap.
“To a Miss Maureen Toney, née De Ligne—”
“That’s me, right here.” Aunt Maureen straightened in her seat. “Maureen De Ligne. My ex-husband, he—” She swallowed, adjusted her bra. “Never mind.”
“Indeed.” Fontenot’s nasal bayou accent made the word stretch on and on. “Diana wished for you to take possession of your mother’s jewelry—”
“Costume stuff, mostly.” Maureen’s lips twitched as she reached to take the velour pouch of jewelry from Fontenot. Then she seemed to hear herself, how absurd she was. She patted the pouch as if it were a small pet. “Course, it has its sentimental value.”
“Diana also bequeathed to you her car, though, unfortunately the vehicle is”—he glanced briefly at Eureka, then seemed to wish he hadn’t—“irretrievable.”
“Dodged a bullet there,” Maureen said under her breath. “I’m a leaser anyway.”
“As well, there is this letter written by Diana,” Fontenot said.
Eureka watched as the lawyer produced an envelope identical to the one he’d given Beau. Maureen reached across the table and took the envelope. She stuffed it into the bottomless cavern of her purse, where she put things she was eager to lose.
Eureka hated this lawyer. She hated this meeting. She hated her stupid, whiney aunt. She gripped the rough fabric of the ugly chair beneath her. Her shoulder blade muscles tensed in a knot in the center of her back.