The Reading of the Will

The ceiling fan in the front parlor of Willow Gate had clicked on every third turn for as long as Margaret Whitlock could remember. On the morning of June 14, 1994, it was the only sound in the room.

Mr. Daniels, the family attorney, adjusted his reading glasses and smoothed the pages of the will across his knee. Margaret sat on the velvet settee between her brothers. Thomas smelled of the cigars he swore he had quit. Ray kept checking the gold watch their father had left him, as if the afternoon had somewhere better to be.

“To my son Thomas,” Mr. Daniels read, “I leave the north pasture and my late husband’s truck, which he never once let me drive.”

A few relatives laughed politely. Thomas did not.

“To my son Raymond, the silver service and the house in town. To my daughter Margaret, my piano, my recipe box, and the care of Willow Gate itself, for as long as she wishes to keep it.”

Margaret felt her brothers turn toward her at the same moment. The house was worth more than everything else combined, and all three of them knew it.

Mr. Daniels cleared his throat. “There is one more bequest.” He looked up, past the family, toward the folding chairs at the back of the room. “To Miss Evelyn Carter, I leave the cedar chest kept in the attic, its contents, and the letter enclosed with this will, which no one else is to open.”

Every head in the parlor turned.

The young woman in the last row could not have been more than twenty-five. She wore a navy dress that was too warm for June and held a small purse in both hands, the way people do at funerals for someone they did not know well. Margaret had noticed her at the church and assumed she was one of Ada’s hospice nurses.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said, in the voice he used on contractors. “Who exactly are you?”

Evelyn Carter stood. Her hands were shaking, but her voice was not.

“Mrs. Whitlock wrote to me every Christmas since I was six years old,” she said. “She never told me why. I was hoping one of you could.”

No one answered. Upstairs, in the attic none of them had climbed into for twenty years, something settled in the heat with a long, slow creak.