Chapter 6
Emmaline
Gran’s lawyer’s office was on the second floor of a brick building west of the old rail yard.
The lower level had sustained significant water damage from the flood, but not so much that the entire building needed to be condemned.
I didn’t remember what had been downstairs before.
Whatever business it was had either pulled up stakes and left or hadn’t yet gotten around to finishing repairs.
The first floor had been stripped down to the studs, with basic structural repairs completed, but nothing more.
The upstairs, though, looked pretty much the way I remembered it from the one time I’d come with Gran, years ago, when she’d signed something I didn’t understand and patted my hand like it was the most natural thing in the world to make big decisions at a cheap, six-seat conference table.
Back then, the room had seemed large. Today, it was a shoebox, with George Whitlock, his secretary, and eight Maddox relatives waiting to hear what Gran had left them.
There were more Maddox kin, but some hadn’t wanted to make the drive all the way here when there wouldn’t be room.
These were the emissaries. A faintly musty odor lingered beneath the scents of old coffee and pine cleaner, along with something metallic that tickled the back of my throat and made me vaguely queasy.
Or maybe that was just the purpose of today’s proceedings.
The reading of Gran’s will.
Five weeks had passed since Bodie had delivered the news, hat in hand.
Five weeks for the formal identification, acquisition of whatever proper signatures were needed, issuance of the death certificate, and getting through the funeral.
That had been last weekend, all lilies and casseroles and people saying, “If you need anything” even though you know you won’t pick up the phone.
Now there was only my family packed into this room like we were all waiting for a bus to somewhere none of us wanted to go.
From the head of the little conference table, Mr. Whitlock straightened the stack of papers in front of him. “Would anyone like coffee? Water?”
“Let’s just get this over with,” Karen snapped. She’d installed herself at my right, with the put-upon air of a woman attending a boring meeting she was too important for.
My mouth was dry, with a chalky taste I couldn’t swallow down, but I shook my head. If I took a bottle, my hands would shake.
If the elderly lawyer was surprised by my aunt’s terse reply, he didn’t show it.
Instead, he nodded to his secretary in the chair across from me.
A neat woman with neat hair and the kind of painstaking penmanship that suggested she had a mental ruler keeping her lines straight, she waited with a legal pad and pen already poised.
Whitlock settled, squared the stack of papers in front of him until the edges lined up, and looked around the table like we were a jury he meant to win over.
Marla had chosen the seat to my left, as if proximity would translate to righteousness; she crossed her legs and bounced one foot, the cheap rhinestones on her sandals flashing under the overhead lights.
Two of my cousins—Roxie and Ben—sat in the remaining chairs, and a few more relatives hovered by the wall with varying expressions of boredom and avarice.
“We are here to read the last will and testament of Evelyn Grace Maddox, executed six years ago and reaffirmed by codicil two summers past.” Whitlock glanced at me. “Your grandmother made a point of keeping her affairs in order.”
That should have comforted me. It didn’t.
He began in that steady lawyer cadence, words like hereby and bequeath rolling out like pebbles.
A ring for Roxie. The painting for Gran’s sister Viv.
A cash account I didn’t know about split three ways among cousins I barely saw.
My brain tried to climb onto that first item and ride it out.
Rings. Quilts. Trinkets. We could do trinkets.
“The primary residence, located at 214 Maple Street,” Whitlock read, turning a page that rasped like sandpaper, “is to be bequeathed jointly to my daughters, Marla Elaine Maddox and Karen Lynn Maddox Crowder, and son, Rayford John Maddox, with all contents therein not otherwise disposed of.”
For a moment, I could only focus on the fact that she hadn’t updated the will when Uncle Rayford, Ben’s father, died in that mining accident five years back.
Then the meaning of all those words I’d barely heard crashed through.
The house where I’d lived since I was sixteen years old, when my mother had run off, abandoning me and Wesley. My home.
Not mine.
My fingers tightened on the chair arms until the vinyl bit into my palms. The room shrank another inch.
Marla made a soft sound, almost a coo. “Well, now.” She tipped her head as if graciously accepting a tiara. “’Bout time Mama recognized what Karen and I deserve.”
Deserve. The word scratched up my throat like a swallowed thorn.
“Jointly,” Karen repeated, tasting it, already calculating. “We’ll see to it the place doesn’t become a museum.”
I turned my head toward her slowly. “It’s a home.” My voice was thin in this airless room.
“For now,” Karen said.
Whitlock cleared his throat in a way that said he’d had practice delivering less-than-ideal news. “Maddox Bread Company, together with all fixtures, equipment, inventory, and receivables,” he went on, “shall be bequeathed to my granddaughter, Emmaline Charlotte Maddox—”
The breath that had been stuck in my lungs seared out of me. Some part of me—stupid, hopeful—loosened. The bakery. Mine.
“—provided she is legally married by the close of probate.” He didn’t look at me when he said it.
He looked down at the paper and kept reading because that was his job.
“Should this condition not be met, or should she predecease me, the bakery and all associated assets shall pass instead to my daughters, Marla Elaine Maddox and Karen Lynn Maddox Crowder, jointly.”
The table jerked under my hands. No, that was me. I was the one who jerked.
“I’m sorry, what?” My whole face had gone numb.
Whitlock’s eyes lifted, sympathetic in the way of a man who’d had to deliver too much bad news. “I recognize this is unusual. But conditions precedent are permitted under North Carolina law, provided they are not contrary to public policy.”
“But—” I swallowed hard and hit pain, the kind that made my eyes water. “She can… she can do that?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
Karen laughed—short, bright, ugly. “Of course she can. It’s right there in black and white, Emmaline. Guess Mama didn’t trust you to handle it on your own.”
“Mom,” Roxie hissed, but softly, like she didn’t want to get pulled into the undertow.
Marla leaned in, her perfume sweet and thick. “Bless your heart,” she murmured, and managed to make it sound like a prison sentence. “Other women your age have husbands, families. Your grandmother just didn’t want her life’s work ending up with a… a spinster with no stake in the future.”
Heat flared across my cheeks, fast and mean. “Gran ran that bakery alone for thirty years after Grandpa died. She didn’t need a man to keep it upright.”
“She also had sense enough to know she wasn’t twenty-nine forever.” Karen tapped one manicured nail on the table. “Someone to share the load—that’s all she was saying.”
She wasn’t saying anything. She was dead.
The words on the paper were speaking for her, and I couldn’t ask why.
I had never asked her why about anything.
Not really. Because in her own, sometimes terse way, she’d always loved me, and I had trusted that to be enough.
She’d always said the bakery would be mine someday.
She’d never mentioned any stipulations, so what the hell was this?
“Please.” Whitlock didn’t raise his voice. It didn’t matter; the word spread a thin layer of authority over the mess. “If we can keep comments to a minimum until I finish, I’ll open the floor for questions.”
Open the floor. This wasn’t a floor I wanted open.
I wanted to crawl under the table and press my face to the cool wood and breathe until the panic in my chest quieted.
Instead, I pressed my knees together so tightly my thigh muscles trembled, and fixed my gaze on Whitlock’s hands as he turned the next page, the paper whispering again.
He kept reading. Pieces and pieces, names and numbers, things that mattered to people in this room who were not me.
The edges of my vision blurred. The room tilted once more.
Somewhere to my right, Ben muttered, “Damn” under his breath and then coughed to pretend he hadn’t.
The secretary’s pen scratched steadily. One of the standing cousins slurped his coffee.
By the time Whitlock said, “That concludes the personal property list,” I had picked at a hangnail until it bled, a neat, accusing dot blooming on the pad of my thumb. I curled my hand in on itself to hide it.
“Questions?” Whitlock’s voice was careful.
“Yes.” My voice came out low and hoarse. “How long is ‘the close of probate’ supposed to take?”
“Ordinarily six to twelve months,” Whitlock explained. “We generally move efficiently in this county. I can’t promise a date, but I would expect six months on the shorter end, assuming no complications.” He hesitated. “If you intend to meet the condition, Ms. Maddox, it would be wise to—”
“To find a husband?” I asked, incredulous. Even I heard the brittle edge.
He didn’t flinch. I respected that. “To attend to your affairs in a timely manner.”
Karen made a show of looking at my bare left hand. “So who’s the lucky man, Emmaline? Anyone we know?”