60
Sam walks out of my aunt and uncle’s guest room bathroom, towel around his waist after his shower the morning of the reading of the will, part two.
I’m midway through getting dressed, but my brain has powered down as I stand there in my jeans, staring at the small pile of T-shirts in front of me. I’m not an indecisive person either. I think I dressed nicer for the reading of the will before, but this time I don’t feel like it.
“You look nervous,” Sam says, coming up behind me. He pulls out an off-white T-shirt from my pile and hands it to me. “This one,” he says.
He’s magic, isn’t he? I think I’m beginning to like being read. Just sometimes though.
“I am nervous,” I tell him.
Sam puts his hand on my waist. “For which part?”
“All of it?” I shrug. “I don’t want to see Oliver, and I don’t want to see Maryanne.”
“They won’t say anything to you.”
I give him a look. “Yes, they will.”
He tugs a gray T-shirt over his head. “Then I’ll say something to them.”
“Sam,” I sigh, and he shrugs. Just shrugs. As though he’s being reasonable.
Then he looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “You reckon there’s going to be any other surprises in there?”
“What?” I scoff. “Like, a surprise second lover who he’s bequeathed a ski chalet? I mean, I hope not, but what a curveball.”
Sam chuckles as he sits on the bed to put on his shoes.
“Hey, have you spoken to Oliver this morning?” I ask.
He nods. “Yeah.”
“How’s he doing?”
Sam’s face pulls. “I think he’s pretty anxious about it.”
I frown. “That he’ll be left out again?”
“Yeah, but—” Sam shakes his head. “I mean, all things considered… Why would your dad do that, Gige? He’s not your grandfather.”
I’m not so sure. “He is my grandfather’s son though.”
Sam thinks about it for a few quiet seconds, still not convinced.
“I don’t think that’s the sort of thing you do in death. People tend to try to right their wrongs in their wills and on their deathbeds, you know? I don’t think that’s how he’d want to leave the world—”
“You didn’t even know him,” I remind him.
“Don’t need to.” Sam shrugs again. “People, for the most part, they’re all the same. No one’s trying to be shit, everyone’s trying their best—”
“Then why didn’t he just confess in his will?” I ask, eyebrows up.
And then Sam gives me a look like I should know better.
“Who would that be best for?” He waits for me to answer, but I don’t say anything, so he shakes his head again. “Literally no one, except maybe him.”
It gives me pause, and I don’t know what I think, whether that’s true or not. Would the truth really be better for no one except my father (and arguably Alexis)? Or is it more that the truth would just be so heinously damaging for Mom that it outweighs it either way?
Vi knocks on the door, yells through it that we’re leaving in five minutes.
There’s a big lunch that’s been organized for after, I learn on the way. I try to convince everyone in the car with me that we should blow it off and have a lunch with “just the good ones who we actually like”—Vi turns around from the front passenger seat and flicks me in the leg for that.
She says it would mean a lot to my mother if I was there, and I remind her that she doesn’t even like my mom that much, and then she gives me a look and turns back around, acting like I’m hard work, but I see Clay smirking about it all in the rearview mirror.
We pull up to the lawyer’s offices around the same time as Oliver and Maryanne arrive in the car with Mom and Jason.
Sam and I are mindlessly holding hands as Oliver walks toward the entrance to the building where we wait for him.
“How are you feeling?” I ask him quietly.
Oliver clocks my hand in Sam’s. “Like you care.”
Then Oliver walks on ahead and Sam’s mouth tightens, defensive on my behalf.
“Go check on him?” I tell Sam.
Sam flicks me a look, but I flick him one back.
“Be patient,” I tell him, and Sam nods once, though he doesn’t look all the way sure before he walks quickly after my brother.
“You okay?” Tennyson asks, coming up behind me with Savannah.
“Yeah,” I say by reflex as the four of us walk in together. Savannah gives me an uncertain look and I give her a third of a smile. “I just can’t tell anymore whether Oliver’s this upset because I’m shit and I hurt him, or if it’s all amplified because he’s drinking again.”
“Both, probably,” Tennyson says with a shrug. “I mean, it’s always shit when you like someone and they don’t like you back. Even worse when you like someone and they like someone else instead of you, and when it’s your sister? That’s got to”—he grimaces—“you know? But…the alcohol can’t be helping him think any clearer.”
“Yeah,” I say, because what else can I say?
“Maryanne is also stoking the fire though,” Savannah interjects.
I purse my lips. “I figured.”
Tennyson’s face twists, all riddled with frustration. “We were chatting about everything the other day with him, and I reminded him that Sam is not and has never been gay—and Mer blew on into the conversation and said something like, ‘Doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been one day. Maybe he was on his way to falling in love with Oliver. I bet he would have, too, if it wasn’t for Georgia.’”
My blood feels a bit like it’s boiling. Maryanne has been not just disparaging of my brother’s sexuality all his life, but cruelly dismissive. So seeing her embrace it now as weapon…? God.
“He wants to be angry at you,” Tennyson says as we reach Desmond’s door. “He’s found someone who loves to feed that anger.”
We’re the last to arrive; everyone else is seated. Sam and Oliver are sitting on a three-person couch, and there’s a space open next to Sam, so I go sit in it, but as soon as I do, Oliver gets up and moves to a chair beside Maryanne.
It feels precise. Like it was a calculated decision to reject me in front of everyone, because that seat was there the whole time, and he could have moved there before.
Sam glances at me, and he has a look in his eye, and I try to hose it down with the look in mine. Leave it.
“And we’re back.” Desmond smiles at us collectively, then zeroes in on me. “I understand we all have a little bit more clarity around the revelations from last time.”
I wonder if he knew?
Maryanne makes a bit of a spiel about how it’s so like our dad to gift someone a lake house for an act of kindness from over thirty years ago. “Most people would forget,” she sniffles, and Jason puts his arm around her because that’s what he’s supposed to do, I guess. “But not Daddy.” She shakes her head. “Not Daddy.”
And then she cries a little bit. These really delicate, believable tears, and I have to hand it to her—there is some artistry here. Like, don’t get me wrong—is that very same skill set terrifying and unsettling? Absolutely, yes. But it’s also objectively impressive.
Once Maryanne feels adequately placated and the center of attention, Desmond does the intro again—you know, the “I, William Marcus Carter, being of sound mind and body, not acting under duress, fully understand,” blah blah… Everything is how it was the first time.
Mom gets their family home here, the Florida Keys holiday house, and ten percent of Dad’s company.
Violet gets that painting.
Tennyson is left the other ninety percent and Dad’s old car he loved a lot.
Me, I’m given that piece of land, that book, and the SS Avoidance (both of which make a lot more sense now than before). Alexis is of course bequeathed the lake house in Moultonborough that is an actual house and not just a plot of nothing, and then Desmond turns to Maryanne. Both she and Jase are watching him with eager, almost hungry eyes.
“To my daughter, Maryanne, I leave my Sunseeker 86 yacht. To my—”
“Wait,” Maryanne butts in. “Is that all?”
Desmond glances down at the papers in front of him, either uneasy with the question or just Maryanne generally—it’s hard to tell.
“Just a boat?” Maryanne asks again. “That’s all he left me?”
No one says anything for a few seconds.
“I mean—” Savannah grimaces. “Isn’t it, like, a four-point-five-million-dollar boat?”
“Who asked you?” says Jase pretty suddenly at the same time as Maryanne’s whole face scrunches up.
“Shut up, Savannah!” she says. “Like, what are you even here for?”
“Don’t tell her to shut up!” Tennyson scowls.
Maryanne lifts an eyebrow. “Then why don’t you tell her to shut up?”
“Why should he?” I nod my chin toward Jason. “Your deadweight partner’s always running his dumb mouth and we have to listen. At least she’s cool.”
Maryanne’s eyes widen ever so slightly—that was affronting and insulting to her, completely unacceptable.
She leans in toward her husband and whispers, “Do something.”
Obediently, he stands, which obviously then has Sam immediately on his feet, and before my sister’s stupid husband has a chance to say a word to me, Sam points at him. “Sit the fuck down.”
Jase does, quick smart, and I do a terrible job at hiding my delight, but frankly, so do Vi and Clay.
Desmond clears his throat—this poor, poor man just trying to get through the reading of this will sometime before the century’s over—and gives Maryanne a ginger look. “Yes, that is all.”
Maryanne puts her head in her hands, forlorn, and our mother pats her back.
Desmond catches both my eye and Tennyson’s, takes a measured breath, and keeps going. “Lastly,” he reads. “All funds in my personal account, totaling to the sum of sixteen million, seven-hundred thousand, I bequeath to my son, to whom I owe much to, Oliver Carter—”
And all the air in the room gets sucked out.
No one moves a muscle—no one even blinks—as he keeps talking.
“—with the condition that he must be sober for five hundred and forty-eight days to access the funds.”
I stare over at Oliver, eyes wide—but not as wide as his.
“Oh my God,” Maryanne says under her breath, staring at him. Mom says nothing.
“I—” Oliver starts, but then stops talking—he looks scared. He stares over at me out of habit before he drags his eyes away and over to Maryanne, then back to Des. “There has to be a mistake.”
“I assure you, Mr. Carter…” Desmond gives him a gentle smile. “There isn’t.” Then he glances around to the rest of us. “I’ll give you all a moment.”
He excuses himself (probably to get a stiff drink), and everyone sits there in…it would be underselling it to say “stunned silence.” It would be more appropriate to say we’re sitting in like, practically electrocuted silence. Every single one of us.
And me? I am…I don’t know what I am. Relieved for Oliver? So unspeakably relieved for Oliver. But also a bit…I don’t know—what’s the word? Crushed?
And I don’t want it to be apparent on my face; I don’t want anyone to see anything on my face that I’m feeling, because I don’t even know myself what I’m feeling, so I make an excuse and say I’m going to the bathroom, but instead I go to the fire escape to take big gulping breaths of air.
And please don’t misunderstand me, I’m so glad Oliver got it all. He needs it. Not the money, but the validation. After how poorly Oliver was treated for so long, for how much he was punished for just being himself, a final olive branch from our father from beyond the grave is so completely what he deserves, but what about me? After everything, do I not deserve some kind of kindness too?
I press the tips of my fingers into my closed eyes and try to tell those hot tears to stay where they are, and they would have too if it wasn’t for that perfect, meddling boyfriend of mine, who appears in the doorway of the fire escape.
“You okay?”
“Nothing?” I swallow—a tell-tale sign of a big, powerful emotion—then I shake my head. “I get nothing except a book and a random empty plot of land—like, how fitting. How fitting that he’d cast off his empty plot of land, next to the home he bequeathed to his adulterer, to his adulteress cast-off child. Like, what the fuck—how much did he hate me? Why give me anything at all?”
Sam comes and stands behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist. “I think he was giving you way more than you realize, Gige.”
I say nothing, just stare straight ahead at literally nothing. The view of the fire escape is the back of another building, but I’m staring at it right now like it’s Madonna on the Rocks.
“He knew about your job,” Sam says quietly. “Alexis said he was proud of you, remember? He knew you were good at finding out the truth… He didn’t leave that land to anyone else, he left it to you. If it meant nothing to him, why not just fold it into the lake house lot?” Sam pauses to make his point. “It was intentional.”
I turn around now to face him. “What was?”
“Georgia, I don’t think he was leaving you the empty plot.” He gives me a cautious look. “I think he was leaving you Alexis.”
My head pulls back and my heart skips this strange, hopeful beat. “What?”
“I think he knew you’d figure it out.” Sam shrugs. “And maybe—I don’t know, maybe I’m reaching or hoping or loving you has turned me to fucking mush or something, but I think maybe he knew Alexis could be something to you that your dad could never figure out how to be for you himself.”
I shake my head a little bit, because it’s too thoughtful. “Nothing that I know or have experienced with my father up until this moment would imply that that’s even vaguely a possibility.”
“Gige—” Sam holds my face with his hand and looks at me so tenderly. “I say this with all due respect: I love you, but I don’t think you knew your dad all that well.”
I don’t know why that undoes me how it does, but suddenly I’m crying, and there’s a new kind of stinging in my heart than the old one I was used to.
Could that be true? If that’s true, it would maybe mean not that he didn’t love me at all, just that he loved me in different language to my native tongue, and he never knew how to say it—which, admittedly, is still tragically sad, but is arguably less candidly cruel. Could my father actually have cared about me enough to orchestrate that? Is that even possible?