The Will of Wisteria

by Denise Hildreth Jones

  “Sure,” Jeffrey said.

  “I’m really surprised that none of you pressed through to find me. I understand your men got really close.”

  Elizabeth laughed softly to herself, and much to her surprise she heard Jeffrey do the same. Then she truly knew. The Executor’s heels clicked against the hardwood floors, and he was gone.

  Jeffrey moved first and went to stand in front of Will’s chair.

  “Will, listen, I need you to listen to me.”

  Will’s glazed eyes shifted slightly in Jeffrey’s direction. “We can get you help. Dad told us we can at least do that. We can get you into a treatment facility. We can get you whatever you need, and then we can get you a job.”

  Mary Catherine nodded. “We can, Will. You need this. You need to get help. You can’t keep living this way.”

  Elizabeth went to join them, intending to comfort her younger brother, but Will jumped from his seat and fled for the front door.

  They all ran to the door after him and watched as Will kicked up dust like Forrest Gump down the long dirt driveway, screaming as he ran.

  “Run, Forrest, run . . .” Jeffrey muttered.

  “You think he’ll ever stop?” Mary Catherine asked.

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “He’s been running all his life.”

  “We’ll get him. Somehow we’ll get to him,” Jeffrey said. His eyes still searched the driveway.

  “There’s nothing we can do about him right now,” Esau said. “Anybody for some food? It’s not Sunday, you know.”

  Mary Catherine turned around. “Low Country boil?”

  “Shrimp, crawfish, lobster tails, and crab legs ready to go in the pot.”

  “Matthew will be devastated,” Jeffrey said.

  “We’ll never tell him.” Esau grinned and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Esau walked down to the marsh. The Executor was sitting in the boat, watching the water as it lapped beneath the dock.

  “Is Jeffrey moving in?” The British accent was gone, replaced by a deep Southern drawl.

  “Yes, sir. Probably next weekend. He told me he wouldn’t be bringing much; said he was sick of all that white furniture. It will be nice having life back in the house.”

  “You won’t miss the quiet?”

  “I never wanted quiet.”

  “How’d you do it, Esau? How’d you talk Mr. Wilcott into changing his will? You honestly thought it would work?” He slid an oar into the water, and the movement ruffled the surface, breaking the light into slivers.

  “I felt it was the final hope. He didn’t know how to reach them—really reach them. I told him maybe he could accomplish in death what he hadn’t been able to do in life. That was when I got the idea of changing the will.”

  “You could have inherited everything, if none of them stayed to their task.”

  Esau sat down on the edge of the dock. He slipped his rubber shoes off, rolled up his thin khaki pants, and dipped his feet in.

  “I never wanted the money. All I ever wanted was for them to be a family. Me and Bernice had a family. A good family. These kids never, until this very moment, knew what a real family was—even when their mother was alive, God rest her soul. Money can’t buy it, you know.

  “Anyway, I knew there was enough competitiveness in them to stick it out, especially Jeffrey and Elizabeth. Just to make sure the other didn’t win.”

  “Did you count on Mary Catherine?”

  “No, I prayed for Mary Catherine.”

  “What did you expect from Will?”

  “I didn’t know. I am glad his father didn’t live to see it.”

  “Well, I’m glad he didn’t either. It would have broken his heart, I’m sure.” He arched his bushy eyebrows. “So, promise me you’ll get you a bank account now, and I can stop leaving money under a flowerpot.”

  “It worked, didn’t it? But thank you for doing it. And for keeping it safe. Mr. Clayton didn’t want a big transfer into my account even if it was for the upkeep of the house and the land. He wasn’t sure where the kids would search.”

  “Does this mean we can go back to our Friday night bingo nights?”

  “I’ll try to steal away. I still don’t think Jeffrey needs to know about you quite yet.”

  The Executor pressed his oar up against the dock and pushed off.

  “Are you going to tell me where you got your thugs?”

  “I have eight grandsons. They all have a nice inheritance of their own coming as long as they keep their silence. And they’ve met Will. Trust me, they’re liable to die mutes.”

  Esau laughed. “See you soon, my friend.” He kept his feet dangling in the cool water and watched as his friend rowed up the marsh to his house a quarter mile up the way.

  epilogue three months later

  So, this is where the rich people work?” Ainsley said as she opened the door to Elizabeth’s office at Wilcott Enterprises.

  Elizabeth put on her best snooty rich girl voice. “Oh, certainly, my dear. Do come inside and experience the finer things of life.” She greeted Ainsley with a hug. “You miss me so much, don’t you?”

  Ainsley patted her back. “Miss you? Not a chance. Why would I miss having the place stunk up with those ridiculous candles of yours?”

  “Sit, sit.” Elizabeth said. She pointed to the brown leather tufted sofa.

  Ainsley fell into the sofa and stroked the soft leather. She looked down at the thick Oriental rug and up at the ornate coffered ceiling. “Ever going to give this room a feminine touch?”

  Elizabeth sat down beside her and propped her elbow up on the back edge of the sofa. “I don’t know. It makes me feel close to him, you know. My dad. Being here with his stuff, his books, and his pictures.”

  “So he trusted you to run this place?”

  “Aaron really runs the place. I run the trust. Jeffrey and Mary Catherine agreed I was the best one for that job.”

  “And how are the two of them doing?”

  Elizabeth smiled to herself. She was having a conversation, an actual conversation, with a friend. It was like they were catching up. It was so . . . normal.

  “Jeffrey’s fine. He and Matthew have moved out to the plantation, and Jeffrey’s taken on a new partnership with Dr. Nadu at the Medical University. Mary Catherine’s still teaching, although she used some of her trust money to paint and do landscaping at the school. She says that if you send children to a school that looks like a prison, they’ll act like criminals.”

  Ainsley laughed. “Smart woman.”

  “She’s actually taking Charmaine to see her mother today. The woman has been in rehab for three months and apparently is making real progress.”

  “And Will?”

  Elizabeth looked down and fiddled with one of the buttons on the sofa. “Will is—” She shrugged. “We’ll keep trying. We’re not giving up on him. But our father was right. Will has to stand on his own feet.”

  Ainsley nodded. “We all do.” She tilted her head and gave Elizabeth a piercing look. “You know, what you did was exceptionally vulgar.”

  “You could just say thank you.” Elizabeth nudged her and smiled.

  Ainsley slapped at her hand. “All right, I’m thanking you. What that money from the trust will do for us is—well, it’s something the Benefactor’s Group couldn’t have accomplished in years of fund-raising.”

  “It’s our pleasure. Now, let’s go. I’m taking you somewhere extravagant for lunch!” Elizabeth bounded off of the sofa. “You can get it smothered, covered, and dunked for all I care.”

  She opened the door to see Aaron standing there with his hand raised, preparing to knock. “I was just about to ask if you wanted to get a bite to eat. But I see that you’re busy.”

  Ainsley was on her feet in a flash.

  “Ainsley Parker,” he said, giving her his most charming grin. “A pleasure to finally meet you. I’ve heard all kinds of things about you.”

  Ainsley shouldered Elizabeth out of the way and reac
hed out her hand, bangles clanging at her wrist. He shook it, and she held on, surveying him from top to bottom. “Oh my, oh my. A pleasure to meet you too, you most charming specimen of a man.”

  His face flushed slightly. He turned back to Elizabeth. “You’ve got plans. I’ll go.”

  Elizabeth pulled him back, brushing an imaginary piece of lint off his shoulder for an excuse to touch him. “I’m free for dinner.”

  “Dinner it is, then,” he said, his voice low and smooth.

  “Do you two need to get a room?”

  Elizabeth turned. Ainsley was standing there with her hands on her hips, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  “No, we don’t,” she said curtly. “You and I are going to lunch.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Ainsley said. “Preferably today.”

  “She thinks she’s still my boss,” Elizabeth told Aaron.

  “Somebody needs to keep you in line,” Ainsley said. “And I’ll tell you one thing: if you don’t marry this man, you are sadder than I thought.”

  Elizabeth laughed.

  Ainsley pushed her way past both of them, leaving them standing in the doorway.

  “Now!” she yelled from the front door. “I’m not getting any younger here!”

  “You wanted a friend,” Aaron said with a chuckle.

  “I’ve already got the best one.” Elizabeth said, reaching her left hand up to his cheek. The antique diamond caught a shaft of light from the window and sparkled shamelessly as she leaned in and kissed him.

  A well-dressed gentleman got out of his car and picked his way across the site of the new Habitat for Humanity house in downtown Charleston. “How long has he been here?” he asked the foreman.

  The supervisor removed his hard hat and took out his handkerchief, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Two weeks.”

  “Has he been beating nails like that this entire time?”

  “Sir, he could probably build this house by himself.”

  “What’s that he’s saying?”

  “Not really sure, but he’s been mumbling it since he got here.

  Something about work.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Yeah. Name’s Wilcott. His brother comes by here every evening just to check on him.”

  “Odd.”

  “Very.”

  The two men walked out to the truck that held the latest delivery of lumber. The young man, the subject of their speculations, knelt on the plywood pounding nails as fast and as hard as he could.

  And with every nail he repeated the same words, over and over again. “This has got to work. This has got to work. This has got to work.”

  acknowledgments

  On the beautiful backroads that I often travel from Charleston, back to my hometown of Camden, South Carolina, the lilac wisteria hangs in many of the trees that line those country roads. Like kudzu, you’re not sure where it starts, and you definitely have no idea where it will end. As I made this trip recently, I was reminded once again of the power of something that is left unchecked, uncontrolled, unbridled. It will eventually take over, and the true beauty of what it could be is tainted by what it has become.

  I’ve never written books because I thought I was an amazing writer. To be honest, I often read other people’s work and wish I could write like them. I even come home sometimes and try to create these beautiful, eloquent, rhythmic words, like my good friend Charles Martin, only to find my narrative running along in typical Denise fashion. But the one thing I do believe the Lord has gifted me to do is to take the human relationship and strip it down to the place we all live. That is what I have tried to do with these characters. In all their realness and rawness, I have tried to give each of us a glimpse of ourselves.

  I’ve struggled over the last year with the “whys” of life: the “why” of sickness, the “why” of loss, the “why” of victimization. And I believe I’ve discovered something amazing about our gentle Pruner. Much of life is the result of a fallen world. A divine plan that man abandoned, by a will that man was given. Because of man’s choices, all the inhumanity of this world was allowed. Yet in the middle of the “stuff” of life, God sets us up for victory. He surrounds each of us with everything necessary to win. Whether it is people, talents, or opportunities, he places in our path everything we would ever need to shape even the ornery places of our will into something that can clearly express what we were truly created to be. Each of us will taste “life.” It’s inevitable. But each of us has been given every necessary tool for our refining, our taming, our potential.

  I’ve had a tough year. And there are so many people that I need to thank and acknowledge for making this book what it has become. But this time, I’m only giving written acknowledgment to one. I’m acknowledging the one who so graciously and lovingly took this stubborn, sinful, needy will of mine and surrounded it with everything needed for its victory. Jesus, may you bridle me as needed. May you check me even in my most unlovely places. And at the end of the day, may what I produce be a testament of your great grace, extreme care, and gentle hand. I trust you with my life. Thank you for trusting me with this story.

  reading group guide

  1. In the opening of The Will of Wisteria, each sibling is defined by what they do. Are you defined by what you do or by who you are?

  2. Clayton Wilcott has manipulated his children’s futures from beyond the grave. Has anyone ever tried to manipulate your future? Have you ever tried to manipulate someone else’s? Did you have good intentions? Does that matter?

  3. Each sibling wrestles with the decision of whether to play along with what could be a game or—even worse—a plot. Yet the risk of not obeying is too great if it turns out to be real. Was there ever a time when you participated in something, but didn’t know for certain if it was what it appeared to be?

  4. Aaron is able to see something in Elizabeth that she refuses to admit to herself: her fear. Who in your life is able to see into the deep places of you?

  5. When Jeffrey sees his son Jacob for the first time in years, he was forced to confront the man he has become. Have you had an event occur that ended up revealing to you the person you’ve become? Were you surprised?

  6. Mary-Catherine is responsible for leading her students with a respect that is earned, not a respect that is freely given. Do you have people in your life that have made you earn their respect? How did that make you feel? What did you do to gain that respect? Do you give respect freely?

  7. In Elizabeth’s dealings with Ainsley Parker, her college nemesis, she finds herself reluctantly enjoying her company. Has there ever been someone in your life that you decided you didn’t like only to have them become one of your favorite people?

  8. Elizabeth and Jeffrey come to a critical climax over a secret from their past—a secret that had severed their relationship because of things they thought rather than things that actually were. Has there been a situation or relationship in your life where years were spent in bitterness and anger only to find out that what you thought was true was not what actually happened?

  9. Forgiveness seems to be a part of each character’s ability to move forward. Is there a place in your own life where your inability to forgive has incapacitated your progress?

  10. Wisteria is a stubborn vine, yet it is a vine that can—if someone is willing to take the care attention necessary—even be shaped into a tree. Do you have instances when you’ve let go of your stubbornness and allowed yourself to be moldable? What was the outcome?

  11. Esau had only one desire for these four children: that they become all they were created to be. He was even willing to encourage their father to redirect the course of their lives. He took a huge risk; a risk that if discovered could have, at one point, destroyed any potential to achieve his goal. Have you ever taken a risk on someone who had potential but were incapable of seeing it themselves? What did you do? What would it have cost had they discovered your motive before they were ready?

  12. In the end, Will was
trying to achieve something that was no longer achievable; his chance had passed. What character traits are needed to make sure that we don’t miss the most important opportunities, even if they are challenging, in our lives?