Over Her Dead Body(15)
We made small talk while we ate. Her garlic potatoes were the best I’d ever had, crunchy on the outside, smooth as velvet on the inside—I always had seconds and it was never enough. She asked about my dad (her brother) as she always does. And I felt sorry for her, because he never asked about her.
After dinner came tea and cookies. I was on my third Lorna Doone by the time she finally got down to business. “I’m going to change my will.”
I didn’t know why she was telling me this, so I asked, “Are you asking me to do it?” I was pretty sure she had an estate lawyer, but maybe they’d had a falling-out?
“No, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m leaving everything to you.”
I was so caught off-guard by the pronouncement I nearly choked on my cookie. “Sorry,” I said, grabbing a napkin to sweep up the shortbread bits I’d coughed onto the table. “You know I can’t let you do that.”
I knew Louisa was mad at her children, that she felt they’d abandoned her. And I knew why she favored me. I did more for her than all our other family members combined. Charlie and Winnie were so messed up after losing their dad they could barely take care of themselves, so someone had to hold the poor widow’s hand. Louisa was helpless. She’d earned the family money, but her husband had done everything else—run the house, managed their investments, weeded the garden, changed the light bulbs. When Charles Sr. died, Louisa didn’t know where their checkbook was, or what bank to call to get a new one. She needed help, and I guess I needed to be needed. My mother had my father, and I didn’t have a girlfriend (as we’ve established), so helping Louisa was a way to fill the hole that was always waiting to swallow me up. I did everything she asked, from updating her operating system (phone, computer, tablet, repeat) to unclogging her kitchen sink. She called me the son she never had, and that made me feel good, but also bad, because she had a son—he just wanted nothing to do with her.
I should have been thrilled that my wealthy aunt wanted to make me her heir, but I knew what would happen if Louisa left her money to me instead of her children. Our family would become The Hunger Games, with everyone out for blood. Charlie and Winnie would accuse me of manipulating, tricking, coercing, even outright stealing. Plus my father would never stand for it; he’d make me give it all “back” to my cousins, even though it was never theirs in the first place.
I was about to gulp down the rest of my tea and bid Louisa good night when she abruptly stood up. “I need to show you something,” she said.
She turned on her heel and disappeared out the door. I put down my cup and followed her into her study. As she pulled a thin file folder out of a drawer, I felt a prickle of nervousness when I saw what was written on the tab.
“I’ve labeled it ‘Louisa’s Death Folder,’” she said, like she anticipated I wouldn’t believe my eyes, which I nearly didn’t. She thrust it into my hand and gestured for me to open it. Inside was a document entitled “Louisa’s Last Wishes” that laid out exactly how she wanted to die: no being kept alive by a machine, no wake, private funeral, and absolutely no one looking at her dead body. To make sure it would all go as planned, she had prepaid for everything: casket, funeral home, plot, the administration of her will by a fancy Beverly Hills lawyer. The lawyer’s card and all the receipts were stapled to the folder, and a handwritten letter addressed to her children was paperclipped to the side.
“Louisa,” I said, that nervous prickle spreading across my skin, “why are you showing me this?”
“I should have shown it to you a long time ago,” she said with a dismissive snort, then snatched the folder back. “It will be right here,” she said, filing it between her automotive service records and copies of her cable bills. Later I would kick myself for not grasping what had spurred all this talk of wills and last wishes, but at the moment I was too in shock.
We returned to the dining room to clear the table together, and then I shooed her out of the kitchen to clean the dishes. As I soaped and rinsed her prissy, antique dinner plates, I tried to process what had just happened. Why did Louisa just show me her death folder? What was the sudden impetus to change her will? Was she serious about wanting to make me her heir? Or was she just testing me? I found it contemptible that Charlie and Winnie had turned their backs on their mother, but there was no way I could steal their inheritance out from under them. Just because they’d behaved badly didn’t mean I should, too.
I thought about what I would say if she tried to force the issue. If she didn’t want her kids to get everything, the most logical solution would be to carve up her fortune—leave some to Winnie and Charlie, some to me and my siblings. But I knew she wouldn’t go for that; the goal clearly was not to compromise—it was to punish. I didn’t know what Louisa’s kids had done to deserve such a harsh punishment, but I intuited—correctly, as it turns out—that not coming to visit was just the tip of the iceberg.
Louisa managed her own finances, but I looked in on them from time to time to make sure the accounts were secure and that her investments were still working for her. So I knew just how much money was at stake here—over $10 million. Of course Louisa was very much alive, so all this talk of wills and dying wishes was just screaming into the wind. No one was getting rich anytime soon. Or so I thought.