We sat at my dining room table with three rubber-banded bundles of my grandmother’s mail, mostly final utility notices and past-due circulars from the grocery store. A yellow disconnection warning from the gas company lay right on top of the pile?
My uncle, David, picked up the warning slip and set it back down with a sharp flick of his finger.
“There has to be a ledger, Clara,” he said.
He gripped his heavy brass keyring, holding it tight against his trousers to keep it still.
“She lived on toast and hot water for forty years,” he said. “The pension checks did not just evaporate.”
I twisted my mother’s silver ring around my right pinky finger, feeling the cool metal slip against my skin?
“Maybe there is nothing else, Uncle David?”
He stared at the stack of circulars, his face tightening.
“We go to the house next,” he said.
The floral wallpaper in grandmother Margaret’s living room had faded to the color of wet sand, peeling away from the baseboards in long, dry curls. I stacked her chipped willow-pattern teacups into a cardboard box while David pulled the drawers out of the sideboard.
“Cheap paper,” David said, kicking a loose strip with his boot. “She never spent a dime on this place. Not one dime since 1974.”
I reached into the bottom drawer of the sideboard and found a small, gray tin Band-Aid box, its metal scratched and empty. I set it on the mantelpiece, intending to throw it away later.
Beside it sat a blue plastic coupon organizer, the tabs marked for canned goods and dairy.
“We are wasting time with the dishes,” David said, his voice rising. “The lawyer said three-thirty, didn’t he?”
“He did,” I said.
“He better have the deed to the property,” he said.
Mr. Henderson, the estate lawyer, did not look up from his desk when we sat down in the two leather chairs. He opened a manila folder that contained exactly three sheets of paper.
“Margaret was very specific about her final wishes,” Mr. Henderson said.
He reached into the folder and pulled out a small, white envelope, entirely blank on the front. He slid it across the mahogany desk toward me.
