The lawyer opened the folder, looked around the room, and said that before he read a word of the will he had been instructed to read something else first.
Doyle said something about not needing a preamble. The lawyer said it was not a preamble, it was an instruction, and he intended to follow it.
Mama came into that office on a Tuesday in April, on her own, in a taxi, while I was at the store buying her the peppermints she liked.
She was eighty-eight and she was clear as a bell and she dictated one page and signed it.
He read it standing up.
Before the will: the estate will first pay my daughter Marlis for twelve years of my care at the going rate for a home health aide in this county, which my lawyer will get from the county and which I will not have argued about. That is a debt of my estate and not a gift. What is left after that is split evenly between my two children, and I mean evenly, because I am not going to use money to settle something between them at the end of my life. Doyle, I am leaving you exactly what I am leaving her, and you and I both know what that costs you.
Then he read the will. Two pages, and it did exactly that.
The aide rate the county gave him works out to more than the house is worth. The estate is the house and about eleven thousand dollars, and the arithmetic ran out before the even split.
Which is why I did the thing that has caused an argument in every family gathering since.
I waived it.
Not all of it. I took eleven thousand and signed the rest away in that office with everybody sitting there. The house sold in July and Doyle and I split it down the middle, the way she wrote it.
Because that is what she said. Evenly, and that she was not going to use money to settle it, and the second I let that number stand it would have been money settling it forever.
Doyle did not say thank you. He has not said thank you.
He also has not said one word about free rent to anybody since he walked out of that office, and his wife has not laughed into a teacup at me anywhere since.
He called in March. Nine minutes, eight of them about a truck he was thinking about buying, and then he asked what her last week was like, and I told him.
He cried on the telephone from Fort Worth and I let him and I did not say one word about the four visits.
That page is in my kitchen drawer. Not framed. I take it out about once a month, read the last sentence, and put it back.
He stood by our mother’s casket and told a room I did it for the house. She had already been downtown in a taxi and put it on the record that I was owed more than the house was worth, and then she wrote down that we were to split it evenly anyway, and she knew exactly which one of us that sentence was going to cost.