“You were a good child, Philip. I want you to try very hard to become a good man. Those are not always the same thing. You still have time to make them one.”
He sat on that step for a long while after he finished.
Then he folded the pages carefully — three times, along the creases — and put them inside his jacket.
He looked over at his mother’s blue shutters.
Then at the empty bird feeder in her side yard.
What He Asked His Own Lawyer
When he turned back to me, all the anger was gone.
“She changed the will three months ago.”
“I know she changed it. I didn’t know when.”
“You really didn’t know what was in it.”
“She told me not to open the envelope. So I didn’t.”
He studied me for a second.
“She trusted you.”
“Yes. She did.”
He stood up and turned to Nathan.
“What happens with the undue influence claim?”
Nathan was already putting documents back in the folder.
“With what your mother assembled here? You don’t have a viable case, Philip. There’s an independent attorney’s certification of the will. There’s a physician’s capacity evaluation dated the same week. And there’s a documented financial record.”
He paused.
“The transfers to Northline are a separate matter and we need to discuss those privately.”
Philip understood.
Before he left, he looked back at me.
“Mrs. Mercer. I’m sorry I came here like this.”
And I thought about what his mother had written.
You still have time.
“I know,” I said.
What She Left Me
Two weeks later, Ada’s estate attorney called.
Robert Fenn, seventies, has an office above a dry cleaner on Warren Street.
Ada had left me the contents of her front room.
Not the good furniture. Not anything an appraiser would care about.
Her framed photographs.
Her detective novels — four shelves of them, most read twice.
A crooked pottery bowl Leonard made in a night class in 1975 that is, I want to be honest, genuinely ugly.
The peppermint tin from beside her front door.
And thirty-eight shoeboxes.
Fifty-Four Years of Christmas Cards
Ada had saved every Christmas card she ever received since 1971.
Every year had its own box, labeled on the end in marker.
I started reading them one box at a time and I’m still not finished.
The early boxes are two young people building something. Cards addressed to Mr. and Mrs. L. Holloway in handwriting from people who are all gone now.
Then 1979, and the cards change completely — congratulations, a baby, a new family, a future going outward in every direction.
Then, gradually, the names thin out. Friends stop sending. Then a whole run of sympathy cards mixed in with the Christmas ones in 2009.
Then the signatures change from Ada and Leonard to just Ada.
You can trace an entire life through those boxes if you go slowly.
In the 1972 box I found a card from a man named Gerald — a man Ada nearly married before she met Leonard, and who I’d heard about exactly once, at her kitchen table, in a conversation she ended abruptly.
Four words inside it.
I hope you’re happy.
She kept that card for fifty-three years.
The Phone Call in December
Philip called me in December.
He said he wanted to apologize properly. Not the porch kind.
He apologized for arriving at my house with an attorney.
He apologized for suggesting his mother couldn’t make her own decisions.
He apologized for not knowing about her fall, which he said had kept him up more than anything else in the letter.
Then he was quiet for a while.
“She kept that water bill in her desk. Right on top, in the middle drawer.”
“I know.”
“She wanted me to find it.”
“I think she wanted you to understand what it meant.”
Another pause.
“She wasn’t dependent on you.”
“No.”
“You were just there.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a different thing.”
“Very different.”
What He Decided to Do
Then he told me two things.
