PART 3 — WILL
Franks letter was short. He wrote that he had always worried Michael might one day let someone talk him out of honoring his own mother, and that if that day ever came, I was to call Mr. Novak and open the second document.
I did. The second document was a trust Frank set up before he died. The money Michael thought of as his inheritance, the money he and Courtney were quietly counting on, was mine to control for the rest of my life. Frank had made certain of it.
By noon the next day I had signed my name four times in Mr. Novaks office. I was seventy years old and I understood every single page, which rather settled the question of whether I was senile.
They called me a woman who should be put somewhere, not knowing the roof over their heads and the fund they were waiting on had been resting in my steady hands all along.
The courier delivered the envelope to Mount Lebanon the next morning. When Courtney saw the return address, she understood. The quiet checks for preschool, the twenty thousand dollars, the standing Wednesday babysitting, all of it had come from the senile old woman.
I did not cut them off out of spite. I simply stopped carrying people who were ashamed of me. I kept seeing my grandchildren, on my own terms, picked up and dropped off like any grandmother, no longer a line item they could insult.
Michael came to my door alone two weeks later and wept on my porch. I forgave my son. I have not forgotten the look on his face in that restaurant, but I forgave him, because that is what mothers do.
Frank knew his boy might lose his way. He left me not with revenge, but with footing. And a woman with footing does not need anyone to defend her.