Nobody at that table said a word for what felt like an hour. Troy closed the folder and set it down as gently as if it were a baby bird. Brian sat with his mouth open, his knife still in his hand, a bit of glaze on his chin. The cat, who had been waiting under my chair for the ham, finally gave up and left the room. I took a sip of my coffee and said, “Please, everyone, eat. It is getting cold.” It was the calmest sentence I have ever spoken, and I think it frightened them more than a shout.
The granddaughters ate. They were seventeen and fifteen and had the hungry look of girls who had endured an hour in a car with a father on a mission. The younger one, Emily, kept looking at me over her glass with an expression I could not read. At last she said in a small clear voice, “Grandma, did you know he was going to do this?” I said I had suspected since February. She nodded slowly. She said, “Good.” Then she cut her ham into tiny, precise squares, the way I taught her when she was four, and ate every one.
Brian found his voice. He said it was all a misunderstanding. He said he had only meant to protect me. He said I had not been thinking clearly since the fall. He said a good many things, rising steadily in pitch, and I let him say them, because I taught high school for thirty three years and I know that a boy who is allowed to finish talking will usually hang himself. When he stopped, I said, “Brian, how much did Troy promise you?”
A house is only wood and glass until the one who built it stands on the porch and decides who may sell it.
He did not answer. Troy did, in a very low voice, to his plate. He said the commission was ordinary, and that there was a bonus, thirty thousand dollars, from a developer who wished to put up condominiums on Elm Street. He said he had not known about the deed. He said he was deeply sorry, and then, to my amusement, he asked if he might be excused. I said he might take a plate of ham with him. He took the plate, and the last I saw of him he was crossing the lawn with the ham held in front of him like a hymnal.
On Monday morning I called my lawyer, Mr. Abbott, who has handled the affairs of the Lindqvist family since the Kennedy administration. By noon the power of attorney was revoked, the sign was gone from the yard, and a letter had gone to the realty office reminding it of the penalties for listing property that it could not sell. Mr. Abbott chuckled the whole time, which is not typical for him. He said he had waited fifty years for someone to try this.
The trust, as it happens, is real. It holds just over four million dollars, built by the father of Harold from a lumber company in Delaware County and left alone since 1971. Harold and I lived on his salary and mine, and we drove the same Buick for sixteen years. We did not tell Brian, because his grandfather had asked us to wait until we saw what sort of man he would be. We saw. It was not a happy afternoon, that Easter, when I closed the book on the question.
Brian did not come to the house for three months. His wife did, once, in June, to bring me a pie. She stood on my porch and said she had known nothing and was ashamed. I told her to come in and have a slice, and we sat in the kitchen with the windows open, and she cried a little, and I let her. She has since become a surprising ally. She says she is going to enroll in a night course. I told her that is the finest answer to shame I know.
The granddaughters come on Saturdays. Emily wants to be a lawyer, and she likes to hear about the clauses of the deed. Her sister, Anna, is writing a novel, and has asked me to read it, and I have, red pen in hand, with a merciless and loving eye. Over iced tea on the porch they tell me about school, and boys, and the absurdity of their father, and they make me laugh until I have to hold my sides.
In September I put a chair lift on the stairs, since my knees are not likely to improve, and I named it Harold. I also put a quarter of a million dollars of the trust into a scholarship at Muncie Central, for students who write well and have no money, and I hung a plaque on the wall of the library, which says only, For the Boys and Girls of Muncie Who Have Something to Say.
Brian came on Thanksgiving, unannounced, with a bunch of grocery store flowers and a face like a boy who has been sent to the principal. I handed him a legal pad. I said, “Five hundred words. What you meant to do, and why.” He sat at my table and wrote for an hour. It was poorly organized, full of passive verbs, and the best thing he has ever given me. I gave it a B minus, with a comment in the margin. It said, Revise. Come back Sunday.
