Whatever’s in that letter.
Let it go.
For the family.”
“Uncle Ray, if a stranger had filed a petition calling me unemployed and unstable to take four million dollars, would you tell me to let it go?”
A long pause.
“That’s — Caro, that’s different.”
“Why?”
He didn’t have an answer.
He did, however, come to the hearing, which I’ll get to.
Friday night, I drove to my grandmother’s house.
There was a sign in the yard.
COMING SOON — a realtor friend of my father’s had planted it six days after the fun*ral, before the will was even read, back when my parents still assumed.
The estate attorney had made them take the lockbox off the door.
Nobody had bothered with the sign.
Coming soon.
I sat in the car across the street for a long time.
I thought about the map inside the pantry door.
Every port I’d ever sent a postcard from, marked with a red pin, in the handwriting of a woman who had never been on a plane.
I thought about whether the pins were still there, or whether they’d gone into a box marked ESTATE SALE with everything else she’d touched.
I did not go in.
Nana had told me, in one of her last letters: “Don’t go into the house until it’s yours.
Let them clear it.
What matters isn’t in it.”
I had not understood that line.
I sat in the car and read the last letter she’d sent me, in the Pacific, six weeks before the end.
“Caroline.
The doctor says months.
I’ve told your father it’s ‘a bit of trouble with my heart,’ because if I tell him the truth he’ll start measuring the drapes.
I have done everything you told me to do, and one thing you didn’t, and I’m not sorry about either.
When they sue — and they will — don’t argue.
Don’t explain.
Bring your folders and sit down and let a judge read what I wrote.
I’ve spent sixty years being talked over by that boy.
I’d like to be read aloud, once, in a room where he has to be quiet.”
Monday morning, I understood.
Judge Harmon opened the envelope himself.
It was cream-colored, sealed with tape and, over the tape, a single strip of my grandmother’s handwriting: OPEN ONLY IF THEY SUE. THEY WILL.
He read it silently first.
His face did not move.
Then he said, “Counsel, the letter is addressed to the court.
I’m going to read it into the record.”
“All of it.”
My mother’s hand went to the pearls.
Gil Farrow, who had spent a week reviewing materials, closed his eyes.
PART 4
“To the Honorable Judge,
whoever you are.
My name is June Ostrander.
If you’re reading this, I’m gone, and my son Roger and his wife Paulette have sued my granddaughter Caroline for my money.
I knew they would.
