Chapter 19 #2
“I know. If he broke the law or violated his duties to the estate, that’s for the court to deal with. I’m talking about me.”
Rachel nodded.
“My grandmother loved him,” Emma continued. “Whatever else he did, he was still her son. I don’t think she left me that cottage because she wanted me to destroy him. I think she wanted me to keep him from taking it. There’s a difference.”
Rachel nodded.
Emma looked again at the columns of numbers.
She wanted Gloria’s wishes honored, but she didn’t want Arthur’s mistakes to decide what the next year of her own life looked like.
She had already spent too much of her life giving time to things that left little room for anything else.
She finally understood that winning didn’t have to mean taking everything she could get.
“I want my grandmother’s house,” she said. “That’s enough for me.”
“Then we protect the house, establish the will and let the rest unfold the way it has to.”
“Okay. Tell me about Wednesday.”
Rachel walked her through the hearing. Judge Ellsworth would hear argument on the competing wills and the requests Rachel had filed concerning the estate.
Edmund would testify if his health allowed it.
Rachel expected Arthur’s lawyer to challenge Gloria’s capacity and the circumstances surrounding the later will, and she had already begun preparing for both.
Emma probably wouldn’t testify that day, but Rachel wanted her in the courtroom.
“I want Arthur to see you,” she said.
Emma raised an eyebrow.
“Not because we’re putting on a show. Because this is your grandmother’s estate and you have every right to be there. Wear something you’d wear to a client meeting.”
“You want Chicago Emma.”
“I’ve met Chicago Emma. She’s useful.”
Emma smiled. “Understood.”
When they were finished, Emma stood and Rachel walked her toward the front desk.
“Thank you, Rachel. I don’t know what I would have done without your help.”
“You’re welcome. Try not to spend the entire weekend thinking about this.”
“I make no promises.”
Yolanda looked up as they passed.
“Middle stack?”
“I didn’t touch it.”
“That’s my girl.”
Emma stepped onto Whitehead Street and put on her sunglasses.
Her car was parked less than a block away, but she didn’t want to get into it. For the last hour, they had talked about Gloria’s life in terms of probate filings, account balances and property values. Instead, Emma wanted to walk for a while and think about her Gloria Kendrick.
She turned toward the water.
Maeve was on the foredeck of No Worries, coiling a dock line Patrick had left in what she considered an unforgivable state before driving to Miami for the day.
The marina was quiet. Most of the charter boats had gone out hours earlier, and a pelican stood on a piling three slips down, watching the water as if it had nowhere else to be.
Maeve had grown to appreciate mornings like this.
In Boston, even time off had usually contained a list of things she ought to be doing.
Key West had changed that. She still thought like an attorney more often than she wanted to admit, but she no longer felt compelled to turn every hour into something productive.
A year ago, she wouldn’t have recognized the woman standing barefoot on a boat in cutoff shorts, worrying about a badly coiled line.
Then again, a year ago she hadn’t known the truth about where she came from.
Maeve had been adopted by two people who gave her a good life in Boston and loving them had never stopped her from wondering about the woman who gave birth to her.
That question had eventually brought her to Key West, where she found more than she expected.
She found her mother. She learned that Connie, the owner of Margarita Max’s, was her aunt.
She fell in love with Patrick, a local boat captain and tour guide who had somehow become an important part of her life.
She still told people she hadn’t decided if Key West was permanent. Lately, even she had begun to hear how unconvincing that sounded.
Footsteps came along the dock behind her. Maeve glanced over her shoulder and recognized Emma Kendrick immediately.
She had spent two hours across a table from Emma a week and a half earlier and had noticed that Emma walked like a woman on her way to a meeting even when there wasn’t one.
“You’re still wearing the blazer,” Maeve said.
Emma looked down at herself. “I had a meeting with Rachel.”
“It’s May.”
“Everybody on this island keeps telling me that.”
Maeve smiled. “You’ll learn.”
Emma stopped beside the boat, and Maeve could tell from her face that the meeting had given her more to think about than she wanted.
“Come aboard.”
“You’re busy.”
“I’m fixing something Patrick should have fixed himself. I can still have a visitor while I’m doing that.”
Emma stepped onto the boat.
Maeve brought out two glasses of lemonade and a dish of pretzels, and by the time she sat across from Emma at the teak table, the blazer had come off.
“How bad was it?” Maeve asked.
“Rachel’s thorough.”
“That bad, then.”
Emma smiled.
She told Maeve about the estate, the condo, the brokerage account and the rental income Arthur had collected from the cottage.
More than the numbers, she told her about the decision she had reached in Rachel’s office.
She wanted Gloria’s will honored and the cottage protected, but she didn’t want the rest of her life in Key West to become a campaign to punish Arthur.
“It could be a lot of money by the time Rachel sorts through everything,” Emma said. “I thought hearing that would matter more to me than it does.”
“And Arthur?”
“I haven’t spoken to him. Rachel told me not to.”
“Keep listening to Rachel.”
“I plan to.”
For a while, they drank their lemonade and watched the marina.
Maeve didn’t press her. She knew what it was like to discover that the story you had been telling yourself about your own family wasn’t the whole story.
Sometimes the kindest thing another person could do was sit nearby while you rearranged what you thought you knew.
Eventually Emma looked at her.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“When did you know you were staying in Key West?”
Maeve set her glass down.
She could have given Emma the easy answer. She could have said she knew when she found her mother or when she fell in love with Patrick. Both would have been partly true, but neither would have been honest enough.
“I don’t know that I’m staying forever,” she said.
“I’ve never sat down and made that decision.
What happened is that I kept not leaving.
I came down for two weeks last September and went home to Boston.
Then I came back at Christmas and again in February.
I’m five weeks into a three-month leave now, and I haven’t looked at a return flight once.
At some point, I had to admit that probably wasn’t an accident. ”
Emma looked toward the water.
“Doesn’t it feel strange not having a plan? I mean, eventually you have to decide something.”
“It felt strange at first.”
Maeve understood the question beneath the question. Emma wasn’t asking about airline tickets.