The Inheritance

by Zelda Reed

  The Inheritance

  Vol. 1

  Zelda Reed

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  Copyright

  First Original Edition, September 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Zelda Reed

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent from the author.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

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  The Inheritance

  Vol. 1

  One

  My father dies on the Wednesday after all the schools in Baltimore City let out for the summer.

  I’m cleaning out my classroom when I get the call, my cell phone ringing from my desk in the corner. The desk, I have to start calling it, because after I hand in my keys it will no longer be mine. Miranda, Miss McKinley, math teacher extraordinaire with the too-white teeth and bad wig is taking over my room. “Because it’s bigger, you know, and your air conditioning never breaks, hahaha. Look at me, I sound like such a bitch. I’m sorry, I just need your space.” There was no room for argument and not a hint of negotiation because Miranda’s fucking Principle Jones and I’m moving to the other side of the building.

  I have three boxes filled with what my student’s call, white-girl-shit. My white girl picture frames from Pottery Barn, filled with photos of my white girl friends, and my white girl mother. My white girl mug spells out my white girl name in a beautiful typographical script: Caitlin W. My white girl stacks of neon folders rest atop my white girl books (The Bell Jar, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, and Mansfield Park) and my white girl post-its and my white girl pens, pencils, markers, and a framed copy of my college degree. I debate tossing it all out and starting anew in August, when I pick up the phone.

  “I didn’t think you were gonna answer.” It’s my mom. She sounds exhausted but I know she’s just woken up. Last night was her late shift at The Diner.

  “Why wouldn’t I have? I’m not doing anything important,” I toss a handful of ‘thank you cards’, handwritten by my students on lined notebook paper into a box.

  “Because,” my mother says with a sigh. Her signature move, starting sentences she has no intention of finishing.

  “What’s up?” I ask, nudging her to the point.

  My mother’s the sort of woman who can sit on the phone for hours, knitting or snacking or watching television low in the background. She and her friends, other working women in their sixties with grey and white hair down their backs, call each other up all the time and say nothing but, “Hello,” “Hello,” before drifting into a comfortable silence.

  “We got a call from Gina.”

  “Gina who?”

  “Gina Murano.”

  I roll my eyes. Gina’s round face pops up in my mind without warning. Everything’s foggy except for her brown eyes, sharp and bright. When she was married to my father, her eyes were her defining feature. “Look at my brown eyed gal,” he used to say. Gal. Because he was perpetually stuck in the 1950s.

  “What does she want?” I ask.

  My mother sighs. “It’s your father. He’s dead.”

  I stack one of the boxes atop the other. “How’d that happen?”

  “Cancer, or something,” I can hear my mother waving her hands. “Or maybe it was a really violent cold, I can’t remember. He’s just dead and she wants you to attend the funeral.”

  “Did you tell her I’m busy?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you aren’t.”

  I glance around my – the – classroom. I’ve taken down posters, cleaned the chalkboard, lined up the desks, and filled my boxes with my white-girl-shit. There isn’t a trace of me left in the room, just a disturbing emptiness indicative of the long summer break.

  “But what if I don’t want to go?”

  “Then you can call her back and tell her so.”

  A groan snakes its way out of my stomach. “Can’t you do it?”

  My mother laughs. It’s light and airy and reminds me of when she was younger and angrier, always cursing my father’s name whenever anyone brought him up. She loved reminding the world of what a piece of shit he was for cheating, and walking out the door without so much as a glance back. Throughout the years her anger’s grown into exhaustion and then relief and finally forgiveness.

  “Caitlin, you’re twenty-five. Call her yourself and don’t let her guilt you into changing your mind.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be able to.”

  My mother laughs again. “But she’ll try and you’ll think about caving in. Trust me. I know the both of you like the back of my hand.”

  ______

  My mother was my father’s first wife, the only woman he married who was close to his age. She was greying in their wedding photos, the years of working on a Western Pennsylvanian farm showing in the light wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and brushed against the back of her hands. She was pretty. Not beautiful, striking, or gorgeous but a pretty woman who caught the eye of my average looking father, when he was working in New York and climbing his way up the financial ladder. But isn’t that how things always go? Poor man marries poor girl, he gets a promotion and they buy a house, he gets another and they have a kid, he gets a third and other women take notice, he gets a fourth and he starts fucking someone younger.

  Divorce, remarry, rinse and repeat.

  Gina came after my mom and lasted the move from New York to Chicago. She was prettier and wore her hair in big dark curls, her accent thick as molasses. She was from Long Island and there was no denying it. My father got rid of her when she started begging for kids and gaining weight.

  Darlene was next and the prettiest of the bunch. Half-black with smooth brown skin, she wasn’t interested in getting along with me and I ignored her just as much. Where Gina was loud, Darlene was pensive and quiet, spending long afternoons reading in the living room before taking my father’s credit card and spending thousands on North Michigan Ave. My father refused to admit it but she left him, for a handsome model who couldn’t provide much money but gave her everything else.

  When I call Gina she tells me my father was dating someone new.

  “She’s twenty-two,” she says, hissing into the speaker. “And she’s a fucking idiot.” Even after all these years a portion of me wants to laugh and ask, how does it feel, but I bite my tongue as she rants. “Her name’s Ashleigh,” she pretends to gag. “A-s-h-l-e-i-g-h. Even the way she spells her name is stupid.”

  I must come to the funeral to meet her, Gina says. I cannot leave her alone with those people. She doesn’t mean my father’s co-workers and friends, the men who are aging and in denial as they sweat through their expensive suits, avoiding the topic of their cold and dissati
sfied wives for a lively conversation about their new receptionist. She means Ashleigh and Darlene. The other women who hate her as much as she hates them.

  I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m not on her team either, not even in the same league as the other women or those men. It’s a problem I’ve had since childhood. As much as I hated my father and Gina and Darlene and the fat cats who roamed in and out of my father’s condo, I kept my feelings behind buttoned lips. I wasn’t a people-pleaser, I was a Julian-Wheeler-pleaser. If I listened to Gina, my father would love me, if I stayed out of Darlene’s way, my father would love me, if I impressed his friends, my father would love me.

  But my father, I’ve come to realize, was incapable of love. He knew how to lust and holler and whistle at women, but to view me as anything other than a nuisance the courts ordered him to deal with, was far too much to ask.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Gina. “I’m not coming to the funeral.”

  I can almost hear her pouting on the other end. “But what about the reading of his will?”

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t you want to know what he left you?”

  “I already know. Nothing.”

  Gina sighs. “You really don’t know anything about your father.”

  I roll my eyes. “If that’s what you think.”

  “I’ve got twenty bucks that says he left you something. And when you get that letter in the mail, from all the way in Baltimore, you’re gonna feel real bad for missing your father’s funeral. Cause he cared enough to leave you something real good and you didn’t care enough to pay your last respects.”

  Gina, still dramatic as ever, hangs up before I can respond.

  ______

  This is the point in the story where you come to hate me. Where you realize you’re dealing with someone who’s shamelessly self-serving and for that, I apologize.

  I decide to go to my father’s funeral because I’m impatient. I want to know what he left me and I can’t wait for a letter to come in the mail while Gina taunts me, via phone, about the big reveal I missed. And if he doesn’t leave me anything (of which, I’m sure is the truth) I want to see Gina’s face as she realizes my father is the piece of shit I’ve always known him to be.

  Two

  On the plane I sit next to a nervous soon-to-be college freshman with cheap square glasses and poorly cut hair. His name’s Dylan and he’s heading to Chicago three months early to get used to the city, before he starts art school in the fall.

  “You’re gonna love it,” I tell him, in that overly enthusiastic way all adults speak to children stepping into a new era of their life. A hint of nostalgia in my voice as I faintly remember my own college years. Eight semesters at BU, suffering through the bitter Boston cold, sucking down bourbon every evening to get warm in the poorly heated dorms.

  I dispel all the rumors he’s heard about the city. “The winters aren’t that bad,” I say, and, “You stay away from the South Side and you’ll be fine.” Occasionally the man in the aisle seat glances over, as if he wants to dispute me, but the pair of us refuse to acknowledge him. He will not burst our positive bubble.

  Dylan allows me to wax poetic about the nightlife, the shopping, the eclectic enclaves sprinkled throughout the city, the long strip of beach where you can press your toes into Lake Michigan, the pizza, the hot dogs, the men (“I don’t know if you’re into that.”), the movie theaters, the off-Broadway shows, the atmosphere, Chicago.

  If it wasn’t for my father, after college I would’ve moved to the city. But after too much time weaving in and out of bars in Logan Square and riding the El to the edge of the city, the toxic memories of my father refused to remain buried.

  I’ll never forget: The summer between ninth and tenth grade, in the last year of my father’s marriage to Gina, she’d gone home to be with her dying mother. It was just my father and I, for three months, and he couldn’t resent me, my mother, and Gina enough for it. I mostly stayed to myself, binge watching television in “my room” (which my father called her room, as if he couldn’t believe he’d bought a space with a room specifically for me) in-between ordering pizza and roaming the city alone.

  There were weekends when my father dragged me out the condo and to some overpriced restaurant, where I would sit among his friends and their wives, pretending not to understand their raunchy jokes. Well Hannah’s geyser is a real squirter if you know what I mean. Haha. Oh come on honey, why you gotta hit me?

  At one particular dinner a man joked about my father’s wives getting younger and younger. Everyone laughed and I forced a smile as to not seem too sullen or dense.

  My father called me, “Cheryl’s kid.”

  One of the other men said, “So you had nothing to do with it, huh?”

  Another round of laughter, polite glances my way, and another forced smile.

  “She’s my only kid,” my father said.

  “Congratulations,” said the third man. His wife hit him lightly on the arm.

  “She’s a beautiful girl,” one of the wives said. “Her mother must be stunning.”

  The first man scoffed. “Cheryl?” he twisted up his face. “Now that’s a woman that requires a bag.” Over her face he meant, while he was fucking her.

  The third man barked like a dog and they all laughed. Even my father.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I know exactly what you were thinking. ‘I can’t get better than this.’”

  My hands tightened in my lap. I was prone to picking at my skin, back then, my nails digging hard enough against my flesh until a small cut opened and bled.

  “But I did,” my father said.

  The second man whistled. “Yes you did.”

  His wife slapped his arm and the women uncomfortably laughed.

  “Hardly,” I said beneath my breath.

  The woman across from me lifted her drink. “I’m sorry, honey did you say something?”

  They were all staring at me, expectant and drunk off their own jokes. My father shifted in the chair next to me, our silent deal swirling down the drain. I was supposed to keep my mouth shut at dinners like these, until someone posed a direct question.

  I was louder. “I said he’s hardly done any better. Gina may be prettier than my mom and that’s subjective --”

  “Not really,” said one of the men. The others laughed.

  “But,” I raised my voice. “She’s unemployed and needy and stupid and,” I was getting worked up. “If the conversation was flipped, if my mom was sitting here talking about how ugly my dad was --”

  “Caitlin,” he warned.

  “-- and how much of an idiot she must’ve been to marry him. Well, that would never happen because she would have the decency to keep those thoughts to herself.”

  The table grew silent. The women watched me with careful eyes, the men pointedly looking away. I could feel my father’s gaze on the side of my face, hardened and furious, but I didn’t care.

  One of the wives broke the silence, her manicured fingers wrapped around the menu as she said, “I think I’m gonna get the Cobb salad.”

  I pushed back from the table.

  No one shouted for me to wait, stop, or come back. I bet my father didn’t even watch as I stormed out the restaurant and onto the sidewalk, flurries of tourists pushing me until I was steps away from the train. I rode around for hours, angry and violently scratching at my arms. One or two strangers came up to ask if I was alright, but I ignored them and no one in the city cared enough to ask again.

  I came back to the condo around eleven, my father in his room, his door shut. I slammed the front door closed, announcing my presence with a bang but nothing in the condo stirred. There was no opening of the bedroom door, my father storming out, his worry transforming into anger, the volume of his voice announcing how much he cared.

  But that was it. He didn’t care.

  No
t then and not ever.

  Three

  Gina, who remained in Chicago after my father left her, offered me the spare room in her house but I declined and booked three nights at The Palmer House. Steps away from Millennium Park, the hotel was like a second home, my safe haven when summers with my father grew enough tension to suffocate the both of us. I would steal one of his cards and book a room for the weekend, ordering room service and movies and pizza close to midnight. I showered with the door open, blared my music too loud, pressed my face against the hotel window and dreamed of the glass disappearing, my body slowly tipping over.

  I should be clear: I wasn’t and am not suicidal. I’m too prideful for that; too concerned about the whispers that would flare up once I was buried. Poor girl didn’t even have it that bad.

  One suitcase is all I brought, small enough to be stowed away on the plane, no time to waste standing around in baggage claim. I have two pairs of shoes, heels and flats, a black dress for the funeral, a shirt and skirt for the reading of the will, and a dress for my plane ride home. Everything’s carefully ironed and folded. I hang them in the closet so they can keep their shape.

  I feel different when I’m in Chicago. Heavier, but in a good way, like I’m weighed down with substance. Chunks of my life are spread up and down the east coast – Boston, New York, Baltimore – but it’s in Chicago where things always happened. The fights with my father, the first time I did anything alone (riding the train, shopping, having dinner in a restaurant), the first time I got my period, and of course the ticker, losing my virginity.

  It happened at this hotel and I was sixteen and fat with love. Even now my head swims when I think about Justin, an uncontrollable smile breaking across my mouth when I remember his sweaty hands roaming over my body, the way his fingers tickled my ribs and how his mouth tasted spicy against mine. I had a salad before we came up to my room. He scarfed down a burrito. It was messy and painful and the best moment of my life, my entire body on fire as he entered me, my orgasm (Orgasm! How many girls have that on their first try?) pushing my back off the mattress and filling my body with all the stars and moons of the universe.