Dream Girl(54)

“This makes absolutely no sense,” he says, scanning the document. His father’s name, his mother’s name pop out at him, but everything else is a jumble.

“What?” Victoria is forever saying “What” and it’s unclear to Gerry if she’s hard of hearing or reflexively says this in order to have something to say. Whatever the reason, it’s highly annoying.

“It’s a letter to my mother stating that my father’s will was contested.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize your father had died.”

“Oh, he definitely died. In September 2001. How can a will be contested almost two decades later and why would my mother care?”

Only it hasn’t been two decades, not according to this letter.

Dear Mrs. Andersen,

This letter serves as your official notice that the probate challenge against Mr. Andersen’s estate has been denied and you remain the sole beneficiary…



Based on the details he can glean from the letter, his father died in early summer 2018, days before Gerry moved back to Baltimore. Had someone tried to contact his mother then? It was a confusing time, with different nursing aides coming and going. In fact, he had sacked one when he realized she sometimes took the day’s mail and chucked it into the recycling bin, unopened. Did his mother even know his father had not died in 2001, as Gerry had been told?

Told by her. That was the only reason he believed his father dead. Because his mother told him, in great detail, how he had died on 9/11.

Your father visits me. We make love in the garden.

In hindsight, he had decided that was the first clue of her dementia. But what if—

“Victoria,” Gerry says, “get my mother’s executor on the phone.”

*



THE EXECUTOR for Gerry’s mother’s estate is an old family friend, a lawyer who had lived on their street. Perhaps not the best way to choose one’s lawyer, but no harm had come to Gerry’s mother by conducting her affairs that way. Tom Abbott is a sweet, gentle man and Gerry had often wished he were his father. But even as a child he could see there was no spark between his mother and Tom.

“I think I’ve untangled things,” he tells Gerry later that afternoon, their third call of the day. “Your father died in June and left a will, dated 2015, in which he bequeathed everything to your mother. ‘Everything’ isn’t a lot—about two hundred thousand dollars, although she would have qualified for his social security, which was more than hers. Because his will was still in probate when your mother died, his bequest to her rolls into her estate. The money will be put in escrow and go to you when your mother’s estate settles.”

“Why was there a claim against it?” Not his most pressing question, not even close, but the best he can manage for now.

“Here’s where it gets a little complicated. Gerry—your parents never got a divorce. Your mother could have asked for one on grounds of abandonment or adultery, but she chose not to. When they separated, in the 1970s, divorce law was far more restrictive and your father may have believed he couldn’t initiate the action. Maybe he didn’t want to because, without a formal dissolution of the marriage, there would be no official orders about child support. Anyway, his second marriage, as a consequence, was never legal. And in 2001, he left that woman, just moved out and on. I don’t know why you assumed he was dead—”

Because my mother told me he was. “I’m not sure, either.”

“But he had no legal obligations to his common-law wife. Kids were long grown. Then he dies and leaves what he has to your mother. His ex challenged the will. They had been together almost forty years, after all. But common-law spouses don’t have standing in Ohio and, even if she did, his will is legal unless she can prove undue influence, or that he wasn’t of sound mind when he made it. He was free to leave everything to your mother and now it goes to you.”

“I’m not sure I want it,” Gerry says. Blood money. No, not blood money. Bloodless money. Guilt money.

Or—is it possible that his father and mother loved each other? Is that the part of the story he missed? Is that why his first novel had hurt his mother?

“You can give it away, once it’s yours, which should be by this fall. Donate to some cause in your mother’s name. Maybe it’s chump change to you, but it’s enough to do some good in the world.”

It’s enough, Gerry thinks, to cover my losses in transfer taxes and the like if I decide to sell this place sooner rather than later. If he leaves this apartment once he recovers—who would blame him, who would find it suspicious? The apartment tried to kill him, after all. The floating staircase was like a mouth that tried to devour him whole, the whale to his Jonah. There would be almost a kind of poetic justice to his father’s money covering the losses he would incur on all the taxes and real estate fees.

He has recorded his conversation with Tom on his smartphone, informing him, as Maryland law requires, that he is doing so. He then asks Victoria to transcribe it for him, something she grumbles about, but she is his assistant, after all.

That night, Gerry sleeps better than he has in some time. That is, he sleeps well until 2:11 A.M., when the phone by his bed rings and he picks it up and hears a female voice.

“Gerry? Gerry? I’m sorry I haven’t called for a while.”