in an ornate gold frame. I used to hide it whenever I came for a visit but it would magically reappear over and over to remind me of love lost. I tired of finding new hiding places, and then, finally, I no longer cared.
The room was a time capsule. It was full of both good and bad memories, all of them mellowed by the passage of years.
I stretched and heard my stomach grumble. It was reminding me that my normal breakfast time was several hours ago. Mabel made the best French toast in the western world. Maybe it wasn’t too late to beg her to indulge me.
Mabel made my French toast that first morning but that was the last we saw of her for a while since she had a new job at one of the hotels on the lake. She needed the security of a full-time paycheck to pay for something purchased on credit. She promised to call Mother when she had some free time. We all knew it would not be long. Mabel hated being tied down to a regular job.
Later that morning Billy’s wife telephoned. He had been helping one of the deacons of the Baptist church repair the steeple when he fell and broke his ankle. Billy would be laid up for at least a month. Mother didn’t have to worry about not being able to afford him for a while.
Cassie and I pitched in with a vengeance over the next week. She got out the tractor and mowed, then raked all ten acres around the house. I trimmed the walkways, borders, and flowerbeds and cleaned out all the dead weeds and grass. Fortunately, Cassie rescued a nest of baby bunnies before I annihilated them with the weed whacker.
The weather was wonderful. The days were getting shorter but they were filled with delicious mellow sunshine as yellow as the sweet Anjou pears that ripened on all six trees at once.
Mrs. Nick, our ninety year-old neighbor came up one day, and we all picked and wrapped as many pears as we could in newspaper to keep them from getting overripe. We made pear butter, preserves, and chutney out of the rest.
When the pears were taken care of, we went back to work on the house and yard. We cleaned out the gutters and fencerows and carried all the debris by the wagonload to the old dry pond bed where we lit bonfires every night. We showered off the dirt and grime and fell into bed too tired to eat only to rise early the next morning with the appetite of farmhands. Mother would cook us a big country breakfast and send us out to work again. At noon she made us fresh lemonade and pimento cheese sandwiches on wickedly unhealthy but wonderfully soft white bread. We ate on the patio, napped a short while in the sun, only to get up and stretch our weary city muscles and start all over again.
It was one of those sweet and well-deserved naps that Mother interrupted with the news that a registered letter had arrived from Ernest Dibber’s lawyer. We grumbled a bit and sat up while she opened it and began to read.
She suddenly turned white as a sheet and then just as quickly beet red. Alarmed I jumped up and caught her just as she started to tip over out of her chair. Cassie grabbed the letter when she saw her grandmother was all right. At least I would like to think she thought about that.
“Son of a bitch!” she exclaimed. “Son of a low down dirty bitch!”
Mother steadied herself and took a deep breath. The color faded to a more normal shade in her face. I held her ice cold hands in mine.
“Are you okay, Mother?” I inquired anxiously.
“No, dammit!” Mother never, ever, swore. It was not “lady like.”
“What the hell is in that letter?” I always swore.
“Crap! That’s what!” Cassie could swear really well. “He left it all to that bastard!” she continued heatedly, “all of it except some piddling amount to Gran, his three cousins, and some old guy. Five hundred thousand goes to some church school and three million dollars to Dibber, Mom. Three million dollars!”
I sat down hard on the concrete patio still holding Mother’s hand. I almost pulled her back out of the chair.
“You have got to be kidding!”
Mother was a woman of steel now.
“No, darling, she is not kidding. There is nothing even remotely amusing about this. William left three million dollars to Ernest Dibber.”
“This is just not fair!” cried Cassie. “Gran, that’s your money! It doesn’t belong to some stupid stranger!”
“Let me see the letter, Cassie.”
She passed it over to me. I read quickly through the opening legal preamble and got to the meat of the letter. William had left each of his three cousins five thousand dollars. He left his old friend, Joe Parks, ten thousand and a Methodist seminary five hundred thousand. He bestowed thirty thousand on Mother. There was no mention of me, Velvet, or Cassie. That hurt. The remainder of the estate, the house and all the contents, including my great-grandmother’s table, he left to his “dear friend, neighbor, and caretaker, Ernest Dibber.” The estimate of the remainder of William’s estate, the stocks and bonds, and the contents of fifteen different bank accounts, was well over three million dollars.
We sat very quietly for a moment or two while the news sank in, and then we all started to talk at once.
“I can’t believe William had.…”
“My God, I don’t understand how.…”
And Cassie was still on, “Son of a bitch!”
Then we were quiet again. I looked at Mother and saw the unbelievable. I do not think I had seen her cry more than one tear since the copious amount she shed when my father died, but she was doing so now and with a vengeance. Suddenly I felt like a frightened little child. There was nothing I could do but reach out and take her hand. Cassie was equally stunned.
“Don’t you cry, Gran! You’ll see! I’ll get that creep if it’s the last thing I do,” she promised.
Mother wiped her eyes on one of the linen luncheon napkins.
“You don’t understand, darling. I’m not angry at that dreadful man. I’m angry at William!”
“But why, Gran?”
“Because he was a millionaire three and a half times over and he made my darling Abigail live a pauper’s existence, that’s why!”
She stood and paced up and down the patio.
“She had to mend and scrape and do without, and all the while he was counting dividends and interest in his miserly little head. Can you imagine how she must have felt?”
She stopped behind Cassie’s chair and gripped the back so hard her knuckles stood out like ivory knobs.
“When Abigail died, I went through her closet trying to find a decent dress in which to bury her. I found nothing but rags. I had to dress her in something of mine because I wanted her to look nice.”
She shook her head sadly.
“How could the man to whom she devoted her entire life treat her in so shabby a manner? How could William make his wife live in such abject poverty for so many years and then turn around and make a millionaire out of that obnoxious neighbor? William must have been out of his mind.”
The tears started to make their way down her cheeks again.
“If
