Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  “Mom had life insurance, she told me there was money to raise me after Danny’s funeral.” Lexie’s face was reddening from the neck up. Cora couldn’t tell if it was anger or embarrassment.

  “We just have to take it a little at a time, okay? You know that. I’ve been loving you since the day you were born, and I want you right here with me. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.” Immediately, Cora wished she could call the last words back to her, like errant but trained puppies.

  “It already has,” Lexie shot as she got up and let her footsteps be heavy to underscore her leaving the room. “So how’re you gonna stop the next thing?”

  When she said that, the fear-mouse that had been eating its way through the wall of Cora’s mind swallowed and saw daylight.

  THREE DAYS LATER, Cora was driving around and around the dissolute blocks of downtown Richmont, looking for the lawyer’s office. Brenda Dunlap was a partner with the man who’d handled Marvin’s estate, the original attorney who’d drawn up both their wills after Cora’s mother deeded the house to them ten years ago, before she died. Given a choice of the three lawyers who had the small office now, Cora picked the only woman. “I’m thinking a man might in his heart feel sorry for Alex,” she’d confided to Jolene. “And the man doesn’t deserve a speck of feeling.”

  The traffic befuddled her, though Richmont was only a smallish run-down city grown like a patch of weeds left unmowed for years in the middle of tended farmland. The county courthouse sagged at the top of steep stairs two blocks away, and Cora used the parking lot marked for court business only. Early Sun was a good deal smaller, but not a suburb by any means. The nearest of those would be the ones outside of Indianapolis, an hour and a half’s drive. No, Early Sun wasn’t even incorporated, just an area east of Richmont with no real town of its own except a blinking yellow light, the boarded up Old Time Holiness Church, Randy’s Live Bait Shop and Niki’s, a weedy gas station selling cigarettes, candy bars, pop and milk in that order of importance. Early Sun’s children went to school in Darrville, to the south, due to the vagaries of how districts are drawn, no kind of logic to it. Darrville had a real town, with a grocery store, post office, a video rental place, Baptist, Methodist and Catholic churches and talk about a Kmart coming. Where Cora lived, the houses were old and two-story with middle-drooping porches, listing shutters and long distances between driveways where the cut-off brown stubble of corn stalks in the winter fields between neighbors looked like the unshaven cheek of God.

  “I really don’t know how to start,” Cora said, taking a tissue from her purse to clutch in her nervous right hand, after the receptionist had shown her—ten minutes late—into the law office. She was breathless from exertion or nerves, or both. “We’re not the kind of people who have much call for a lawyer, Miss Dunlap. Is it Miss or Mrs.?”

  “I use Ms., but call me Brenda. What’s on your mind today?” Brenda was a small sweet-faced woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Her hair was lightly streaked with gray, but one side was tucked behind her ear the way Lexie’s teenage friends wore theirs. I wonder if she’s over twenty-one, Cora thought, and worried that Brenda wasn’t tall or strong enough to take on even a half-runner bean like Alex. Maybe she should have taken one of the men after all.

  Brenda listened patiently to Cora’s explanation, interrupting two or three times to ask a brief question. She took notes on yellow lined paper, which Cora was glad to see. At least she was paying attention. When Cora stopped, Brenda kept looking at her pad for a minute, then cleared her throat.

  “The problem, Mrs. Laster, on the issue of adopting your granddaughter isn’t the social security. It’s that for you to do it, Alexis’s father’s parental rights have to be formally terminated by the court, or he has to give permission for the adoption.” Brenda didn’t even look up until she’d almost finished.

  “Well, then, we’ll just tell the court to terminate his rights, is that what you called it? He’s never had any.” Perhaps Brenda didn’t entirely understand. Maybe Cora had left out some crucial detail, like the center of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

  “No, ma’am. It doesn’t work that way. He has rights. Courts nowadays are very cognizant…uh, aware of…fathers’ rights.” Brenda had suddenly thought to use a simpler word than cognizant. She tucked a straight strand of hair back behind one ear. Then that too seemed out of place, and she wanted to give up. Her own husband hadn’t paid his child support for two and a half years, but the court wouldn’t suspend his visiting rights. She felt his garlicky breath laughing in her face when he picked up their son.

  “I don’t understand. You mean he’d have to know?”

  “Yes, ma’am, he’d have to know. It’s a calculated risk. Your granddaughter is only three years from turning eighteen, and her father hasn’t been heard from for…what—” Brenda consulted her notes, then continued “—fifteen years. Maybe you should consider letting sleeping dogs lie. And I don’t use the word dog lightly.”

  “Lexie, that’s what we call Alexis, she’s afraid. She feels she can’t have any peace of mind, you know, and I confess I think about it, too.”

  “But you say there wasn’t any actual legal finding that terminated his parental rights?” Brenda sighed and began to go back over the facts. “If his rights weren’t terminated by the court, and he’s the legal father, it’s not good.”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “Did your daughter leave any files, any papers you can go through to check? Records?” Surrounding Brenda were file cabinets and shelves filled with the documentation that wins cases word by inked-in word. The essential trail of whole lives can fit into manila folders, and Brenda had won a lot more cases with thick files than with thin ones, although no matter how thick the file she compiled on her ex-husband, it was never enough.

  “I have her will that names me guardian, like I said, and it’s witnessed, and her life insurance that goes to Lexie. There’s some other stuff, letters and her diaries.” Cora was wedged between the arms of a too-narrow chair, her hips and thighs bulging out beneath them, refusing the suggested confinement.

  “How far back do the diaries go?”

  “There’s a lot of them. I haven’t looked. It seemed like I didn’t have the right, you know, that’s personal. My other daughter, Rebecca, she’s the one who got them out. I told her to put them all in a box, along with Christine’s letters, and give them to Lexie.”

  “Perhaps you could go through everything and see if there isn’t some legal paper you might have overlooked. Or anything we might use in court…against the father, I mean.”

  “I’ll talk to her about the…risk. If she still wants me to adopt her, will you do it for us?”

  “It could get very ugly. It could also get expensive. Of course, we can go after back child support,” Brenda said, warming to that subject. But then she flipped to the other side. “I have to warn you, this kind of thing usually does get ugly, and after it gets ugly, there’s still a good chance you’ll lose and it’ll all have been for nothing.”

  “I don’t want his money. Just Christine’s social security for Lexie. My husband’s pension isn’t a lot, and I just have that and my own social security to raise her. But would you try anyway? If Lexie wants to, I mean. I’ve got to be able to tell her one way or another. Myself, I don’t think Alex is going to do anything that might cost him, any way you look at it. He wasn’t the most industrious.”

  “If you ask me to represent you, I’ll give it my best.”

  There was a metal girder under Brenda’s voice when she answered that made Cora feel better about not having a man lawyer. Still, she hoped Brenda had enough actual muscle to help her out of the chair she was sure she was stuck in.

  “As long as I don’t have to see him,” Lexie said that night at dinner, pushing Cora’s meat loaf from one side of her plate to the other. She picked at a cooked carrot. “I don’t ever want to see him, but I want you to adopt me.” Cora wondered what Lexie knew, but she di
dn’t want to provoke questions on the subject of her father. She sighed, her head starting to ache again. Had Christine told Lexie something bad, that Lexie was so vehement?

  “I hate him,” Lexie said, as if in confirmation.

  four

  GRANDMA TALKED to a lawyer named Brenda. She has to have my father’s permission to adopt me. That is so stupid. The lawyer says it might be best to just let it go, because she’d have to publish some notice to try to find him. Grandma says maybe some cousins still live in Richmont and would see it. Maybe they’re all dead, though. Maybe he is, too. I’m not counting on it, nothing else has turned out that good.

  I want Grandma to adopt me, but I think she doesn’t want to lose the social security money. It will be expensive to raise me. Mom wants me to go to college. A real estate person already looked at my house ’cause of Aunt Rebecca nosing in, wanting Grandma to sell it right away, and Mom’s car, too. I think she’s afraid that if Grandma runs out of money she won’t have enough to make loans to her. I should just say ‘enough to give her,’ because Mom said Rebecca doesn’t pay Grandma back. Mom got disgusted with her because Mom saved up for everything she bought us.

  We only just got our house a year ago and I love it. We got new furniture and everything. It’s small, but we each have a bedroom and there’s a fence around the yard. Grandma’s house feels more like it’s not mine than it did when Mom and I lived in our own house. Back then, I’d just come in and help myself. I could just make peanut butter and jelly, or take cookies and milk. Now it seems rude. I don’t want to eat too much because Grandma has to pay for all of it. I know there’s insurance, but Grandma says she’s going to save that for college.

  I went back to school on Monday. All the kids stared at me and then pretended they weren’t, like I’m a freak and they have to be polite to or they’ll get detention. I think maybe Tim wants to break up. He’s really sweet to me, but maybe he just thinks he has to be because everybody would think he was lowlife pond scum if he broke up with me right after my mother died. He kept trying to give me half of his lunch on Monday because Grandma didn’t know I bring my lunch and didn’t make me one. I didn’t say anything because she feels bad all the time already. I didn’t take any of Tim’s lunch. First of all, I hate baloney, and second, I can’t stand for people to do stuff because they feel sorry for me. Now I buy my lunch and don’t eat what I don’t like. Which is most of it. Mom used to pack me little containers of chocolate pudding.

  I wish Jill went to my school. She sort of understands because Mom was her aunt, but still, it’s different. It wouldn’t kill me if Aunt Rebecca died. I felt all right with Emily at first, but a red Dodge came into the parking lot after school and Emily and I were waiting outside like we always do, because her mom drives us to school and my mom picks us up. I thought it was my mom and Emily turned and said, I thought that was your mom, after I’d already thought that. Then I cried. She thought I was crying because of what she said, and she said she was sorry so many times that then I didn’t really feel okay with Emily any more. It took ten more minutes before Grandma came. I could tell that she’d been crying so I didn’t say anything about the red Dodge.

  I don’t ride with Emily anymore in the morning. I have my grandmother take me to my old house before school every day, then I feel like it’s normal and I’m going to school from my house. But this morning before we left, Aunt Rebecca called and said a line from Gone with the Wind like she and my mom always do. She told me I was going to be late for school if I didn’t get going and then she said, “Horse, make tracks,” and to put Grandma on the phone. She always did that, call too early in the morning and say a line from Gone with the Wind and tell me to get Mom. I read Gone with the Wind last year for my independent reading third quarter and Mrs. Rupel gave me credit for three books because it had so many pages. When Aunt Rebecca did that today, it was like my Mom was supposed to be there and I was supposed to get her to the phone, and then I couldn’t. It was my fault, I felt like, and if I was better, I’d have made her want to live enough that she would have come back when they shocked her heart. Nothing is ever going to be normal again, no matter what house I go from.

  I don’t want to go to the cemetery because the whole heap of flowers on the ground is brown and dead now, even with how cold it’s been. Grandma goes every day. There’s a regular little family plot there now. Grandpa, his and Grandma’s stillborn boy, and my twin sister that Mom’s buried with. And Mom. I’m afraid Grandma will slip on the ice and hit her head and then what’ll happen to me? I feel like Prissy when she was flipping out and crying, “Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies.” I don’t know what’s going to happen to me and I want somebody like Scarlett did. She didn’t know anything, either. Actually, Scarlett really wanted her mother. Miss Ellen wasn’t dead though, so Scarlett still had a mother.

  My mom wanted me, I know that much. We used to fight, but I don’t think she’d have died on purpose. My father, though, that’s something different. Grandma says she wants me and the social security isn’t the important thing. I hope that’s true, cause I think I have to tell her yes, let the lawyer put that notice in the paper if she has to. Alexander’s not going to show up, and if he did, why wouldn’t he just sign the papers? He never wanted me before, he couldn’t have, the way he just ran away when my mom and me needed him the most and never showed up again. Goddamn him.

  I haven’t opened the envelope from Mr. Smith yet. It came today. I got the mail, and I didn’t show Grandma I had it since she’d told him no. I think the picture must be in it.

  The word for me is orphan.

  five

  EXCEPT WITH JOLENE, Cora’s voice rarely betrayed her. “She says she can’t feel safe unless she’s adopted, that he’ll sign off anyway.”

  “Those two don’t quite go together, do they?” Jolene said. They were in Jolene’s kitchen, only a half mile out of Cora’s way back home after she took Lexie to school. Jolene examined the sludge in the bottom of her cup. “I mean, if he won’t care and he’ll just sign off, then what’s she got to worry about? Why doesn’t she feel safe?”

  “I don’t know. Brenda says let sleeping dogs lie. I can see it that way myself. But if I don’t try to adopt her, she’ll think I’m just stuck with her, that I don’t really want her.” Cora sighed and shook her head. Her coffee cup was half-full in front of her, getting cold, next to a blueberry muffin. Jolene noticed and got up to get the pot. Like Cora’s, her kitchen had been there a long time. White curtains framed snowy branches outside the window over the sink. Last night’s snow had been hardly more than a dusting, but because the day was cloudy and windless, it remained on the trees, light and temporary as wishes.

  “I’m warming up your coffee, and I’ll be upset if you don’t eat that muffin. Keep your strength up.”

  “It all done drained away,” Cora said, and imitated the drain suck of an emptying bathtub.

  “Are you thinking what I am, that she’s maybe a little curious about Alex? Wants to get her own take on him? Watch him deny her again, maybe…She only knows about him running off, right?”

  “Oh. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I don’t think so. She doesn’t want anything to do with him.”

  “Hmm” was all Jolene said. After a minute she spoke into the silence that was comfortable as old clothes. “She’s putting a lot of energy into locking a door no one’s knocked on for years and years. Hmm?”

  “SO YOU’RE SURE. You’re willing to take the risk?” Cora had tapped on Lexie’s door a little after nine at night. She’d asked Lexie not to close it at first, but then she saw it made Lexie feel she didn’t trust her. Actually it was Cora whom Cora didn’t trust—didn’t trust herself to know what a teenager was thinking or feeling or doing. Having Lexie where she could see her gave Cora a chance to study the clues. Now she sat on the end of Lexie’s bed in light that was too dim not to ruin Lexie’s eyesight.

  Lexie closed the notebook she was writing in.
“I’m sure, Grandma. I know it’ll cost something. Please take it out of the college money Mom left. I know there’s enough.”

  Cora sighed for all the sweet certainty of youth, that a fifteen-year-old child could think she knows what kind of money it will take to get her through college, or even to college for that matter. “Money has nothing to do with this, honey. Please believe me. You are more important than any money, whether it be coming money or going money. You know I’ve never been of a mind to think that way. I want to make sure you know you’re taking a chance here. See, it’s like you’re locking a door that nobody’s knocked on for years, but to lock it you have to make a lot of noise and that may wake somebody up to come knock.” Cora thought that was the gist of what Jolene had said.

  “You don’t understand.” The statement was flat, resigned, and Cora felt as if she had to defend herself or the conclusion would stand and become a barrier between them, invisible but impenetrable as Plexiglas.

  “I think I do, honey, and I want to adopt you. I have to give the argument against it because if something comes of this we’ll have to deal with it together, and I don’t want you to be unprepared, or to not be thinking we couldn’t end up with a plateful. There’s…a lot to it. Sometimes it’s best not to be dredging up pond sludge.”

  “I know. I’d rather take the chance,” Lexie said. Then she looked at Cora and smiled at the same moment her blue eyes filled up with tears. Cora heaved herself up awkwardly toward the head of the bed and took Lexie in her arms. For once, the girl relaxed into Cora’s embrace, laying her head on Cora’s bosom and letting herself cry. Cora wrapped her hand in Lexie’s thick dark hair, the smell of it so like her Christine’s that she let herself cry a little with Christine’s daughter. Lexie’s ribs felt frail, birdlike beneath her other hand. But right away, with the first, smallest shake of Cora’s shoulders, Lexie straightened and composed herself.