And I mean it in the way that applies to this file.”
Outside the courtroom, Uncle Ray was waiting.
“I didn’t know about the loans,” he said.
“I know.”
“I told you to let it go.”
“I know.”
“There’s no answer to your question, is there.
The stranger one.”
“No.”
He nodded, and put on his hat, and went to find his brother, which is what a soft man does, and I did not think less of him for it.
My father did not look at me as he left.
My mother did.
At the door, she stopped, and I watched her decide whether to say something, and I watched her not.
That was the whole conversation.
It was, I think, the most honest one we’d ever had.
PART 5 — FINAL
The money was not the end of it.
That’s the part nobody puts in these stories.
The judge’s order took effect in thirty days.
The costs took ninety.
The loans — six hundred and four thousand dollars, and three hundred and eleven — were not part of the will, and my grandmother’s attorney was very clear that I could pursue them as debts to the estate, or I could not.
“She left it to you,” he said.
“The choice.
I think she meant that as the actual inheritance.”
I did not pursue them.
Not out of mercy.
Out of arithmetic.
My father did not have six hundred thousand dollars.
He had a house in foreclosure, a business that had failed twice, a Scottsdale property with two liens, and a wife who had learned the numbers from a letter read aloud by a stranger.
Some things did not come back.
The twenty-two months at sea are gone.
I saw my grandmother twice in them, and I have decided that is a debt I owe, not one I am owed.
The house sold.
Not to me — I could have, but Nana had written “what matters isn’t in it,” and I have learned to take her literally.
Nana’s caregiver, a woman named Lupe who had been with her for the last four years, came to the courthouse the day of the ruling.
She hadn’t been called.
She sat in the back beside Uncle Ray, and afterward, on the steps, she said, “She made me promise not to testify unless it went wrong.
She said, ‘Lupe, if the judge reads the letter, I won’t need you.
If he doesn’t, you tell him about the tally.'”
“It went right,” I said.
“It went right,” Lupe agreed.
“She’d be furious she didn’t get to watch.”
The pantry door I did take.
I paid the buyers two hundred dollars for it and drove it home in the back of a rented truck, and it is now the door to the closet in my apartment in Norfolk, and taped inside it is a map with red pins in every port I ever sent her a postcard from.
And a tally.
Forty-one calls, thirty-eight about money.
Two hundred and nineteen.
In pencil.
In an old woman’s hand.
I have not added to it.
The fund came in the spring.
I did not want a foundation with my name on it.
I have seen what people do with foundations.
What I wanted was simpler, and Nana’s attorney helped me build it: a legal fund, in her name, that pays for one thing — a capacity evaluation, on video, and one hour with a lawyer who has never met the family, for any elder in the county who suspects that what they leave behind will be fought over.
The June Ostrander Fund.
“The Pantry Door Fund,” Brett calls it, which is better, and which stuck.
Brett came in June.
Not to apologize — Brett doesn’t — but to sit at my kitchen table for two hours and say, at the end, “I read the tally.
I was the twenty-two.”
