Chapter Eighteen Portland, OR 2009
Chapter Eighteen
Portland, OR
Laurel Sanderson died the same way she lived—quietly and without fuss, her final thoughts centered on the granddaughter she’d dedicated her life to.
“I know it’s small consolation right now, but you won’t have to worry about money for a while.”
Grandma’s estate lawyer, a slip of a woman with the most enormous pair of black-rimmed glasses Scarlett had ever seen, pushed a piece of paper across the dining room table at her. Since Scarlett’s hands were clasped in her lap and seemed inclined to stay that way, Chrissie had to reach for it.
This past week, Chrissie had been doing a lot of things Scarlett couldn’t.
She cooked and she cleaned. She made funeral arrangements.
She brushed Scarlett’s hair and teeth and forced her into the shower at regular intervals.
The first time her friend had made her shower, she’d forgotten to check in and entered the bathroom an hour later to find Scarlett balled up in the tub, shivering as ice-cold water cascaded down her naked body.
“But this is a check for half a million dollars,” Chrissie said as she stared at it. “That can’t be right.”
“I assure you it is. Laurel took out a life insurance policy the same day she was granted custody of Scarlett. She wanted to make sure her granddaughter would be taken care of if anything happened to her.”
Scarlett’s hands remained clenched in her lap, as in stasis as the rest of her.
Grandma is gone. I’m all alone. There’s no one left who’s obligated to love me.
She still had Chrissie, of course. And somewhere out there, the mother who’d given her life.
And Mitchell and Grimshaw, not to mention a host of school friends who’d been posting all over Facebook about how sorry they were for her loss.
None of them mattered except for Chrissie.
If she were to leave, if she were to decide that Scarlett was too much to handle on her own—
“Give half of the money to Chrissie,” Scarlett said. They were the first words she’d spoken in over an hour, so it was understandable that both parties were taken aback.
“I’m sorry?” the lawyer said at the same time as Chrissie’s vehement “Absolutely not.”
“I mean it. She was as much your grandmother as mine. She would have wanted you to have it.” She turned to the lawyer, pleased to find that her hands had unclenched and were now on top of the table like a normal person’s.
“I can do that, right? You can be in charge of splitting everything down the middle?”
“I can.” The lawyer spoke slowly and looked between the two girls even slower still. “But I don’t recommend it. You’ll be surprised how quickly this gets eaten up by funeral costs and taxes and—”
“Do it. I don’t care.”
“Maybe not, but I do.” Chrissie crossed her arms and set her beautiful face in her toughest, most determined mask.
Someday, that face would save the world, but for now, all Scarlett wanted was for it to promise never to leave her. A quarter of a million dollars seemed like a fair enough price tag for that.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Kahul, but I don’t accept. If Scarlett insists on giving away half her inheritance, you can send my share to the kids’ cancer center at OHSU.”
“Chrissie!”
Chrissie’s expression didn’t change. “What? If you’re going to throw money around like it doesn’t matter, then I’m going to do it, too.
What happened to Paris? To your dreams of getting out of Portland?
Nan just gave you the ticket you needed to make that happen.
You aren’t throwing it away out of some stupid sense of personal justice. I won’t let you.”
The lawyer coughed and pushed back from the table. There wasn’t enough room in the tiny apartment for her to do it properly, so her chair thunked against the wall.
“I’ll just, ah, give you two a few days to discuss this, okay? I’ll keep the check with me for now, but I’m ready to hand it over whenever you give me the green light.”
The lawyer dropped a hand on Scarlett’s shoulder and let it sit there.
People had been touching her a lot ever since the ambulance had come to take Grandma away, lifting her gently from the chair where she’d spent so much of the last few months of her life.
They’d accidentally taken the crocheted blanket with her, but Chrissie had spent hours on the phone to get it back.
It sat now, washed and folded, at the foot of Scarlett’s bed. Chrissie had been the one to do that, too.
Scarlett fought the urge to shrug the woman’s hand away and nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
The door had barely clicked behind her when Chrissie turned on her—and she turned hard. “You know she held on just for you, right?”
There was so much anger in Chrissie’s voice that Scarlett had to do a double take. Was that her best friend speaking to her like that? When her grandmother had just died?
“What are you talking about?”
Chrissie’s chair went the same way as the lawyer’s, clanging so hard against the wall that an answering thud sounded from the other side.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Your grandmother. The one who died two weeks to the day after you turned eighteen. The one who probably had to scrimp and save every single day for the past fifteen years to cover that life insurance payment.”
Scarlett could feel all her blood draining away. “Why are you yelling at me?”
“Because you need it,” Chrissie said—no, yelled. “These past six months were torture for her. She was in pain. She was disoriented. She suffered. For every single second of every single day, she suffered.”
“She… Chrissie. Chrissie.” Scarlett, who had not cried when she woke up to find her grandmother’s dead body, who had not cried when the ambulance took her away for the last time, who had not cried even when the funeral home called to tell her the date of the last time she’d ever see her grandmother again, felt her eyes well up.
“That’s not true. She had good days as well as bad ones. You were here. You saw it.”
The look Chrissie leveled on her turned her blood cold. “What I saw was her putting on a brave face for you. But I also saw her relief during your birthday party. She might not have remembered the day in time to make your cinnamon rolls, but she remembered when she saw you blow out the candles.”
“I don’t understand,” Scarlett said, though she did. She understood everything.
And Chrissie, drat her, knew it. “You’re a lot of things, Scarlett Sanderson, but stupid isn’t one of them. If you give me one single penny of that money, I’ll never forgive you. She bought that insurance policy for you. She lived for you. The least you can do is live for her in return.”
Without missing a beat, Chrissie grabbed the handset of the landline that Scarlett’s grandmother had insisted on keeping well into the twenty-first century.
“Yes, hello. This is Chrissie Thomas. I’m calling about the church for Laurel Sanderson’s funeral service on Saturday. Could you please confirm that it’s still available?”
She spoke with the ease of long practice for this and the dozen other calls to follow: to the county clerk offices to get copies of Grandma’s death certificate, to the ladies from church who’d offered casseroles and baked goods en masse, to the funeral home and the headstone engraver and the other twenty thousand people it seemed were involved in the spectacle of loss.
Later, Scarlett would remember that Chrissie had done all this before. Later, she would sob fat, grateful tears for the seventeen-year-old girl who took the reins in her hands so Scarlett could have the space she needed to grieve.
Right now, however, she took one look at her composed, saintly best friend and stormed out the door.
* * *
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Thanks to Chrissie’s careful planning, the house was a packed one.
Grandma had been an active part of both her community and her church, but Scarlett had no idea how active until she was escorted to her seat in the front row.
She’d have preferred to sit in the back, away from the casket and the flowers and the staring, sympathetic crowd, but that apparently wasn’t a choice.
She was Grandma’s closest family, which meant she was the one everyone had come to see.
In typical Chrissie fashion, arrangements had been made to ensure that Scarlett wasn’t alone throughout the ordeal.
A somber, suited Grimshaw greeted her at the door to the church.
A somber, suited Grimshaw walked her down the aisle to her reserved seat.
And a not-quite-as-somber, suited Grimshaw passed her a flask and encouraged her to drink as much as she wanted while they waited for the service to begin.
“Chrissie’s orders,” he said as she accepted the flask.
“Chrissie told you to get me drunk?” Scarlett whispered as she slumped low in her seat and discreetly tipped back the contents. The strong, unpleasant burn of a college boy’s idea of whiskey scored her throat.
“Not exactly.” Grimshaw took the flask back and kicked back his own discreet tipple before grinning at her in a way that no one had grinned at her for weeks.
People sighed and frowned, sometimes even ran away to avoid talking to her altogether, but they didn’t smile.
Scarlett thought she’d never seen anything so wonderful as that bright flash of teeth.
“But she said to make sure you’re taken care of, and this seemed like the best way to do it.
” His grin dimmed slightly. “My grandma died last year. She didn’t raise me or anything the way yours did, but it still sucked. ”
For some reason, that brief summation of events coupled with the cheap alcohol was the exact combination Scarlett needed right now.
Thanks to Grimshaw, she was able to sit through endless hymns and prayers, listen to a dozen eulogies that painted her grandmother into an unrecognizable character, and even watch with a semblance of serenity as Chrissie took her place at the piano and played Grandma’s favorite song.