What Others Dismiss as Worthless
I turned thirty in a Brooklyn studio apartment with a single candle stuck in a grocery store cake, and that was when the lawyer called. His voice was the particular kind of flat that professionals use when they are delivering information they have delivered many times and have decided is not their job to soften. My parents had died in a car accident three weeks earlier, and I had not yet finished processing what that meant.
I was still in the phase where I expected to hear my mother’s voice when I opened certain apps on my phone, where I reached for my phone to call her when something small happened and had to catch the impulse before it completed. The lawyer did not give me time for that. He told me the will had been filed and it was time for the reading.
Then he told me the basics, which he said he thought I should hear from him rather than in the formal setting. My sister Savannah was receiving the family house in Westchester County. Appraised value: seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Plus the majority of liquid assets. I was receiving a parcel of land and a cabin structure in Talkeetna, Alaska. There was a pause after he said this.
I think he expected something from me. I didn’t give him anything. I thanked him and hung up and sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in my lap.
Talkeetna, Alaska. I had been there once. I was eighteen and had spent a summer with my grandfather Elias while Savannah went to art camp with her friends.
He had been the person I called my grandfather, though the relationship was more complicated than that, a great-uncle who had become something larger in my life by being present when the people with more obvious claims were not. My fiancé Derek was sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop. He was a banker, always impeccably dressed even at home, always doing some version of calculating.
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