Gary the lawyer slit the envelope taped inside the hymnal, and a page fell out with a small brass key on a red ribbon, and he asked me if Charles ever told me about the bank in Savannah. I said no. Richard lunged across the table for the paper.
Gary held it out of reach and read it aloud. It was a second will, dated three months after the one Richard had just demanded be read, signed and witnessed and notarized while Charles was still perfectly sharp, before the cancer took the rest of him.
The house was never his first wifes to leave to her children. Charles had bought it with me, paid off with me, and in this later will he left it to me outright, along with the contents of a safe deposit box in Savannah that the brass key opened.
Richard told me I was the second wife and I would get nothing. Charles spent his last clear months making sure that the woman who drove him to three years of chemo would never be put out on a Friday.
Paula screamed that Charles was not thinking straight. But the will was witnessed by two people and notarized by Gary himself, who testified Charles was clear-eyed and furious about what he feared his children would do. He was right to fear it. They did exactly what he predicted, at his own funeral, before his body was cold.
The later will replaced the earlier one completely. The house is mine. The safe deposit box held Charless savings and a letter telling me he was sorry his children were the way they were, and that he had loved me every one of our twenty-five years.
Richard and Paula did not get the house. They got the furniture Paula once told me to leave behind, because I did not want it. I kept Charless hymnal. It turned out to be the most valuable thing in the room.