The Inheritance

The law office was cold, because the air conditioning ran the way the heat ran in the cottage.

I flew on a Tuesday. It was the second time in my life in a plane and I paid for the ticket out of what I had saved from the school, which took most of it. The lawyer was sixty and had a rubber band on his wrist, and he pushed a folder across the desk and said the number first, which I have always appreciated in a person.

The estate was seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

That was after the debts, the taxes, the funeral, and the lawyer’s fee of nineteen thousand and change. The one gift in the will that was not money was a truck, left to a neighbor, and there was a house on a canal that sold in April.

Everything else went to me. He had looked for me since 2003 and he had found me once, in a drawer.

I did the arithmetic in my head, which took four seconds, and then I said, “There is one more thing.” The lawyer had a chart in the folder, and on the chart were my grandfather’s children, and there were two of them.

One was my father, Nathan Amory, born 1961, electrician, died 1998.

The other was Marguerite Amory, born 1957, and beside her name was the word married and a surname, and then a town, and then a date of death, 2004.

The surname was Vaughn. The town was Welden.

I put my palm down on the paper, the way a person does when the table is not enough. His mother had been an Amory and had died in 2004, when Silas was twenty-three and Marian nineteen, and nobody at that table had ever said the word to me in four months, because nobody there had known to say it. She had died in the county where I was teaching school, and the reason I did not know it was an envelope in a drawer with a stack of receipts.

I signed four papers. I asked the lawyer to draw up three more, and he asked me what they were, and I told him, and he looked at me for a moment and then he wrote them.

Then I slept eleven hours in the rented room and flew home with a cashier’s check inside my coat and my hand pressed to my ribs the whole way.

I did not tell them for ten days, because it is the only dishonest thing I did in that house, and I did it out of a kind of cowardice that I have not entirely forgiven myself for. I wanted one more week of being a woman who rented a cottage for a hundred and fifty dollars a month and had nothing.

On the eleventh day I wrote three letters and put one on the kitchen table under the sugar bowl and left two in the mailbox at the end of the drive, and then I went and taught school and waited for the evening.

Dee cried. She cried for ninety seconds and then went to the drawer where she kept the folder from the bank and read me the number on the bottom line, forty-one thousand two hundred dollars of nursing school, and then she said, “That is the loan. The rest I am putting under the mattress and I am not going to think about it for a month.” And then she cooked for nine people, which is what she does instead of talking, and we ate it for four days.

Marian laughed. She laughed the way she laughs, all at once, like a plate, and then she stopped and stood at the window with her back to the room and said that the vet in the town had been trying to sell his practice for two years and that he wanted sixty thousand and that she had eighty dollars in the credit union. She said it in the even voice that she used for the animals that were not going to make it, and then she went out to the barn and stayed there an hour.

Silas refused.

He did not argue. He came over on Saturday morning and put the envelope on the table unopened and stood there with his hat in his hand and said, “It is not ours.” He said his mother had left that family at eighteen and never taken a dollar from anybody in it, and he was not going to be the one who started. He said a pastor with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars is a pastor with a problem, and he had worked nine years to be a man who could be trusted with a food pantry, and this would end it. He said it clearly, which is how he said everything.

And then he said the other thing, and he said it on the porch, at seven in the evening, with the light going down behind the barn.

He said that the agency had asked him for an answer and that he was going to go. He said the posting would take him out west inside the year. He said he had been thinking about my name in the plate on the wall of the schoolhouse. He said, “I am not going to say anything to you that is not accurate. I do not have in me what the songs are about, and I do not believe you do either. What I have is a place that needs work and a man who has watched you work.”

He said, “You have the constitution for that country. You do not complain and you do not get sick and you can teach a child to read in a building with no heat. A wife out there would not be a decoration. She would be a partner.” He said, “I am asking you to consider it as a piece of work.”

I stood on the step and looked at him. He was not lying and he was not being cruel, and he had done me the honor of saying exactly what the arrangement was, and the arrangement was the problem. He had come to me with a job description and thought about it the way he thought about a grant.

I said no, and then I said why, and I said it in the way he could hear it, which was the language of a ledger.

I said: I have been useful since I was eight years old. At Ridge Lane I was useful and I got a mattress in the back room and the food at the table and no line in the book. At Ellerslie I was useful and they gave me a bed and a bowl and a number on a wall. At Coldbrook I was useful and a man offered me a house in another country and no name on anything. Useful is a thing that can be had cheaply, and I have been had cheaply by four different people, and every one of them was polite about it.

I said: you have described a post to me. I hear it. It is a good post and it is worth doing. But I am not going to be a piece of equipment in a field hospital on the strength of somebody’s accurate assessment of my stamina. I want to be wanted. I am done being chosen for my hands.

I said: and there is the other thing, which is arithmetic. I have one hundred and eighty thousand dollars—my quarter of his estate, with the other three quarters standing in three names in a bank in the Southern Tier, one of which has not been touched since—and a signature of my own that no bank in this state can refuse. You are offering me a cot and a purpose in a county that burns half the year, and you are offering it honestly, and it is still a worse offer than the one I already have in my pocket.

He looked at the envelope on the table and then at me, and he picked up his hat, and he said, “That is a real answer.” Then he said, “I will hold the school open for you until August,” and he went down the hill.

I stood on the porch after he left, and then I put the envelope in my coat and walked out to the state road and back, which is three miles, and it was dark and there was snow coming, the wet kind, and I stopped in the middle of the road.

I did the inventory, which is what I have done in every bad hour since I was nine. The list was: one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in a bank in Florida, one name that was mine and on paper, one key with an address written on the tag, two hands, one coat, and a schoolhouse with my name on the board in chalk.

There were two jars and a bag of potatoes and a hook on the wrong side of a door on that other list. I stood in the road and counted the new one twice, because the new one came out long, and it was the first time in my life that the inventory came out longer at the end than it had at the beginning.