Last Will

by Bryn Greenwood

  Breaking Up

  Meda

  He started to ask me if I wanted to go to his house, but I stopped him. “I just want to go home.”

  I knew what I was going to have to say when we got there, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to get to it.

  “She wasn’t just a whore,” Gramma said from the backseat. “She spoke four languages. She played the piano. She painted. She painted a mezuzah with Judith killing Holofernes.”

  “What’s a mezuzah?”

  “You little idiot, it’s a place to hold a sacred scripture at the doorway to your house.”

  “If we have one, why isn’t it on the door? Maybe I wouldn’t be such an idiot. So who are Judith and Holowhozits?” I said.

  She grumbled.

  “Holofernes,” Bernie said. “If I remember correctly, he was the general of an army that was fighting the Jews. Judith killed him to save the Jews, but she had to seduce him to get close enough to kill him, I think.”

  “She lay down with the enemy,” Gramma said. “And then she cut off his head with his own sword. That was what Meda painted on her mezuzah. Judith beheading Holofernes, only she gave Judith her own face. Your face. When I die it will be yours, and then you’ll see she wasn’t just a whore.”

  “Why not show it to me now? God forbid we should know anything about being Jewish. You see? You can’t just spring it on us and think we’ll know what you’re talking about.”

  “What do you know about it? Nothing. Nothing is what you know.”

  “What else about her? About Meda Amos?” Bernie said, just when Gramma was finally quiet again.

  “Her father was a tailor, brought his family out from New York. She was sixteen. When her parents died of the influenza, Meda was sixteen and her sister was thirteen and they were all alone in the world. There was no foster system, no caseworkers. No one to come and make sure they had food, not like for you, Meda. They didn’t have any money, or any family or anywhere to go. They were all alone in the world. Sixteen years old, she had to lie down with strange men to get food to eat. That was what she had, just how pretty she was.”

  Bernie didn’t ask any other questions. I felt the way you ought to feel on New Year’s Eve. I was ready for things to be over. I wished I could take Annadore and walk away from all the things people expected from me.

  When we got to the house, Bernie pulled into the yard and turned off the engine, so I said the first thing that came to my mind: “I can’t do this anymore. It’s not going to work.”

  He took a deep breath and I knew he was waiting to hear what else I had to say. I hoped there would be less of a scene with Gramma there, because I didn’t think I could handle a scene.

  “Now you’ve seen my family. That’s them. You know the trailer my mother lives in? It belongs to her boyfriend Ted, who’s in prison. That’s what kind of people I’m related to. Wouldn’t you love to have them get together with your friends and family? Can’t you picture my mother at your friend’s party? Celeste was right.” I hated admitting it, but there was no way Bernie and I were going to have a normal relationship. It wasn’t just that we didn’t have anything in common. It was a bigger problem than that.

  Bernie took another deep breath and said, “One: Mr. Tveite is the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Raleigh Industries. He’s not my friend. Two: I can barely picture myself at his party. I didn’t enjoy it, except for being with you. They’re not my kind of people. Three: What was Celeste right about?” That was the thing he sounded most upset about.

  “She was right that I’m going to be uncomfortable and out of place at that stupid Hall of Fame thing. She’s right that it’s weird for me to be dating you. It freaks everybody out, so no more helping me, or giving me presents. No more furnaces, no more $10,000 necklaces. Just no more. Okay? No more of it.” I reached up to unfasten the necklace, hoping I wasn’t going to have to ask him to help me. I wasn’t proud of what I was doing, but it seemed like the only way to go.

  “Do you hate me?” he asked.

  “No, of course I don’t, Bernie. Don’t be stupid.” I didn’t like hearing Aunt M.’s words coming out of my mouth, but I didn’t have any pity for him right then.

  “Then please don’t be hateful to me.” He said it so quietly I knew it wasn’t one of his pretend injuries. He wasn’t trying for pity. I looked over at him and he was sitting there with his hands in his lap, looking straight ahead.

  “I didn’t mean it to sound that way. You’re so nice to me, but I can’t date you. You said I could say stop any time. I guess you’ll do whatever you’re going to do, but I’m saying stop.”

  “Okay. I accept that,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  I wished that Gramma wasn’t listening to us, because he deserved a better explanation that I could give him with her sitting there.

  “I’m sorry if the necklace upset you, but you and Annadore and Miss Amos need the furnace, just as much as Muriel needs surgery. You can’t tell me to take that back, and it was a gift given, as much as the rest of it. So, please don’t try to give stuff back.”

  It was pretty small for a scene, so I nodded, trying to agree with some of it, without agreeing to all of it. I got out of the car and started getting Annadore out of the back seat. Bernie got out of the car, too, and opened Gramma’s door for her and helped her out. He unbuckled Annadore’s car seat and carried it up the steps. I was worried he would come in and make me dump him hard, but he didn’t. He leaned toward me and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s almost midnight,” he said and just barely kissed my mouth. It was a sad kiss.

  Dumped & Sued

  “Happy New Year,” Meda said, but she kept shaking her head at me. “I can’t. I like you, but I can’t.”

  She shut the door. I drove back to the house with a head full of complicated diagrams, like sentences from a Henry James novel. It was already shaping up to be a great year. I didn’t bother to get up at all Sunday. Celeste woke me up the following morning by knocking on my bedroom door with all her powers of perkiness. Giving into the inevitability of it, I got up and answered the door.

  “Good morning, Mr. Raleigh. You know we have a pretty busy day today—are you okay?” She was smiling at me in the weirdest way. Then I remembered why she was looking at me like that and ran my tongue over the split in my lip. It hurt.

  “I’m fine, Celeste. I just overslept. I’ll be down.”

  “Okay?”

  She didn’t move, so I shut the door on her. I looked at myself in the mirror before I showered and saw I didn’t look even a little better. I looked worse, and nothing I sang made me feel better. I ran through the first few lines of a dozen songs, but then I was clean, and without a song, there was no sense staying in the shower to sing.

  I waded through a bunch of paperwork and sat slack-jawed through a conference call on a subsidiary of RI that I was supposed to talk to shareholders about at the annual meeting. Celeste took meticulous notes and smiled at me relentlessly. Thinking about the foundation instead of Raleigh Industries did improve my mood, so I spent lunch working on a list of people I wanted to invite to serve on the board of the foundation. Mr. Tveite had sent me a list of recommendations, which I mostly dismissed out of hand. Just glancing at the list, I could see his recommendations were all bigwig types like himself, including him. They were all men who served on a dozen charitable boards, and left all the real work to their assistants, or women who were married to the Mr. Tveites of the world, and showed up at meetings dressed in thousand-dollar pantsuits. My mother had been one of those women. For all I knew, she still was.

  My list was less glamorous, but it had people on it I thought might actually have some ideas about how to help people. I picked three local doctors, including Dr. Hendershot. To them I added a woman I’d read about in the paper who ran the local food bank, a grade school counselor, a nurse from the county consolidated high school, and a city maintenance worker who had also been in the paper because he’d gi
ven half his annual salary to charity. With a sense of randomness, I put on the list the man who had been the librarian when I was a child, although I was unsure if he was still the librarian.

  I was getting ready to call the library, when Mrs. Trentam came to the study door to tell Celeste that someone was there to see me. Believing the calendar created reality and not the reverse, Celeste didn’t understand how such a thing was possible. There was no appointment on my calendar, therefore no one was there to see me. In the end she cleared my desk and showed in a man who introduced himself as Ethan Darryl, an attorney representing Mr. Raymond Brueggeman.

  I asked Celeste to show him back out and to get my attorney on the phone. As with my other lawyers and accountants, I’d inherited Stroud, Stroud and Whitley from my grandfather. The younger Stroud, Alex, was in my study less than an hour later, looking flushed and curious. He was forty-ish, baby-faced, and he gave the impression that he’d actually run over from the city. I told him everything I could think of, from the actual fight, to the real catalyst for the fight. Not just what Ray had said, but what he’d done. Alex listened carefully, asked questions, and there was a spark in his eyes that was slightly frightening.

  Celeste showed Mr. Darryl, dollar signs in his eyes, back into the study. The attorneys were introduced and Mr. Darryl produced medical records detailing his client’s broken jaw and teeth, and with a flourish, several Polaroid pictures of a swollen and blackened Ray Brueggeman. In one photo, he grimaced, showing the metal scaffolding that held his jaw together. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling and Alex admonished me with a look. Mr. Darryl pointed out that I couldn’t deny the fight—my hand was evidence—and his client had nine witnesses who would testify I had struck him without provocation. He had merely greeted my date familiarly and I assaulted him.

  Alex smiled pleasantly and said, “Is the word ‘cunt’ considered a familiar greeting where you come from, Mr. Darrow?” It was such a beautifully mean-spirited malapropism that I laughed out loud.

  “It’s Darryl, not Darrow,” the victim said.

  Alex smiled again. I sat back to watch the show.

  “Of course, I’m sure your client is thinking of my client’s bank balance in asking you to file this suit, but consider that the entirety of that balance can be brought to bear against your suit. I assume you’re working for a percentage of any settlement? So let me just say, there won’t be a settlement. Ever. At this point, you’ve probably only got a few hours of work in this, so why not cut your losses now? You’re not going to see a dime, no matter how much time and energy you put into it.” Alex gave the impression of being an older brother, offering advice.

  “I beg to differ. The law is clearly on my client’s side. The First Amendment provides every citizen, no matter what his financial situation, a right to say what he likes.”

  “The supposed merits of your case aside, let me tell you what’s going to happen if you proceed with this. Unless you drop your suit, my client has instructed me to pursue any and all legal recourse on behalf of Meda Amos against Mr. Brueggeman for his 1988 assault on Miss Amos.”

  “I—what?” Darryl said, suddenly seeing the conversation gone terribly wrong.

  “It’s common knowledge that Mr. Brueggeman battered and sexually assaulted Miss Amos in November of 1988. He only avoided criminal prosecution because his uncle is the county sheriff. That won’t protect him now.” That last piece of news startled me, because my grandfather had always pretty much decided who was elected to what office in the county. Alex was counting on political obligation trumping family connection. I had a sheriff in my back pocket. Defeated, Mr. Darryl began gathering up his reports.

  “I’ll make you an offer,” I said. Both lawyers turned and looked at me. “You can recoup the cost of some of your wasted time. I’ll give you $100 for that picture.” I indicated the uppermost Polaroid on the stack of pictures he had laid out.

  “You’re kidding,” the estimable Mr. Darryl said.

  “Not even remotely.” I took out my wallet to demonstrate that I was in earnest.

  “My time’s worth more than that.”

  “I doubt it,” Alex said.

  “Make it $200 and it’s a deal.”

  Darryl waited for me to count four fifty-dollar bills into his hand. When he pushed the photo across the desk to me, Alex shook his head in disbelief.

  “I’d report him to the bar if I thought he was a real lawyer,” Alex said, after Darryl had escaped with his unethical money. “Ray Brueggeman aside, I think we should make an offer to Pal Shrader to pay for damages at the restaurant.”

  “That would be good.”

  “I’ll take care of it. You don’t want to get a bad reputation,” he said.

  I kind of thought I did. Alex picked up the picture and looked at it.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have guessed it about you. One punch?”

  It was a small lie, a lie of omission, so I let it ride.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SUBMITTING

  I knew I should wait and give Meda some space, but after Alex was gone, I buckled. I didn’t get an answer when I called, but I knew she was home, because the HVAC technicians were there installing the new furnace. I knew that because I called the company’s dispatcher. I was stalking Meda.

  “Your appointment isn’t until two. Aren’t you going to have lunch?” Celeste said in a proprietary tone, when I voiced my intention of leaving early.

  I almost said, “I want a divorce,” but knowing she wouldn’t get the joke, I said, “I’ll get something on the way.”

  I drove past Meda’s house twice before I parked next to the van in her front yard. When she opened the door, she was obviously expecting it to be one of the techs, because she gave me a look of frustration, but let me in. I didn’t intend to have a full-blown argument with her, but that was what she wanted. In Meda’s narrative, the Hall of Fame dinner was a metonym for our relationship. She didn’t have anything to wear. She would be out of place. She wasn’t the right kind of people. She would embarrass me.

  I countered with the fact that she had been impeccably behaved at the Chairman’s party. It was Mrs. Chairman who had embarrassed me. Meda had been lovely and charming and amiable, I recalled. I sat down on the sofa, gearing up for more flattery—is it flattery if it’s true?—when one of the furnace techs knocked on the door to tell Meda they were breaking for lunch. When she came back, she stood over me with her hands on her hips, obviously thinking of her next attack.

  “You already said you’d go,” I said preemptively.

  “Can’t you take someone else?”

  “I’d rather take you.”

  “Besides, it’s weeks away. Maybe you’ll be sick of me by then.”

  “Maybe I already am.” I smiled at her, but she wasn’t falling for it. “Hey, maybe your mom would go with me.”

  “Shut up. God, take Celeste. She’d love to go. She said the party was going to be so fabulous and elegant, but what she meant was that I wasn’t going to fit in and she was right. That’s why that woman was rude to me. She knew I didn’t belong there. And this stupid thing, it’s a black tie dinner. Did you even tell me that? No. A formal dinner. You’ve already seen the nicest clothes I own. Have you seen anything you think goes with a tuxedo?”

  “Meda, there’s a world of fabulous clothes out there waiting for you to buy them.” I took out my wallet and tossed it to her. She caught it reflexively, but dropped it on the coffee table as if it had burned her.

  “Why don’t you take Celeste? She’d like it and I think you’d both have a much better time.”

  “I’m sure I’d have a great time if I took my little assistant as my date.” I was only thinking of my distaste for Celeste, not of what it might sound like to Meda.

  “You’re right, it’ll be a lot better introducing your date as your housekeeper.” It stumped me because I rarely thought of her as my employee. If anything, I felt like we were both employed by that larger entity: the estate of my decea
sed grandfather. It was like working for a museum I also happened to live in. “I noticed how quick you were to introduce me that way at the party.”

  “Well, you weren’t exactly volunteering the information when you were introducing me to people at the bar.”

  “Because they already knew who you are.”

  “Fine, I’ll introduce you as my housekeeper at the Hall of Fame. Is that what you want?”

  “I want you to stop it!” She threw her hands up at me, sounding truly angry.

  “Maybe I could just introduce you as my girlfriend?” I asked, trying to return the conversation from the brink of madness.

  “I’m not your girlfriend.”

  “Why not?” I put my arms around her and tried to kiss her, but she pushed me away.

  “Annadore.” She looked toward the playpen, hardening her mouth. “And I’m not your girlfriend, and you don’t even want me to be. Honestly you don’t, and I can’t. You should go. I want you to leave.”

  She picked up the basket of laundry she had been folding and went down the hall. I stood at the front door, intending to obey her, but then I had an epiphany. I had wanted to avoid getting seriously involved with Meda, because of all the torments I imagined would result from the relationship. Half of them were already being visited on me.

  I went down the hall and found her in her bedroom, putting away laundry. I felt like I was apologizing for something I hadn’t done.

  “Why aren’t you my girlfriend?” I said, feeling unwanted and lonely without being alone. Meda looked at me for a long time, and then at last she submitted. Or I submitted. It was hard to know where to draw the line. She pulled off the shirt she was wearing, reached back to unfasten her bra, and dropped them both on the floor. Pushing her hair out of her face, she looked at me with something akin to a challenge. That’s why I wasn’t her boyfriend.

  Her breasts were a testament to God’s love for humanity, like beer, as Benjamin Franklin suggested. They were so pale I could see the blues and greens of vein and artery under the surface. The undersides of her breasts and her belly were shot through with fading streaks of opal, where her flesh had given way to internal pressure. There were mysteries about her that I would never in a lifetime be able to fathom. She looked uneasy and half crossed her arms across her chest.