Push(105)

The minister sees me and makes his way over to where I am standing. As soon as I see him coming, I curl my lips into a slight smile and relax my brow and hands. He offers his condolences and expresses his gratitude for the many years of service my mother gave to the church. When she wasn’t travelling with Michael, my mother was a dedicated volunteer, he says, leading the women’s Monday morning Bible study for the past eight years and coordinating and distributing the food pantry collections for the past six. I had no idea that my mother did all that. I never thought about how she spent her time after I left for school every morning. I never bothered to ask. I assumed her days were spent taking care of Michael and the house. The minister says he is grateful to see so many church members here today to pay their respects to a woman they were all very fond of. I look around the room and know now that the faces I don’t recognize are not relatives; they are members of this congregation. My mother’s other family. He smiles at me and says that he hopes I can find peace in the many wonderful memories I have of my mother. He hopes that my stepfather and my brothers can help see us all through this difficult time by offering loving support and kind words. I have to bite my lip again to keep from laughing.

Eventually the minister leaves and heads toward Michael and the men at the table, and I am left standing alone. Within a few minutes, people begin to come over one by one and introduce themselves to me, offering handshakes and small hugs and words of support. I want to punch them all. I want to strike at them for their ignorance. I want to tell them what my house was really like. What my mother and brother and stepfather were really like. I want to tell them everything and stop this godforsaken show. But I can’t. Because I will not lose control at my own mother’s funeral.

After an hour, people begin to filter out. Michael and my bothers are standing by the door, shaking people’s hands as they depart. I am standing with Susan in the far corner trying hard to keep myself together when a well-dressed man comes over to introduce himself. He says is name is Edward Clark, and he is my mother’s lawyer. He hands me his business card and apologizes for not getting in touch with me as soon as he learned of my mother’s death, but he wanted to give me some time. He says that he has been working with my mother privately for a number of years. She wanted to set up a trust for me, to make sure I was taken care of if something ever happened to her. Michael doesn’t know about it, and my mother asked Mr. Clark to keep it private. She had been squirreling little bits of her own money into the account for years and asked him to redo her will to reflect her wishes regarding the trust. Mr. Clark will remain as the trustee until I reach the age of thirty when all monies will be released to me. But, because of my mother’s death, I will now begin to receive quarterly distributions from the trust via an allocation plan determined by him and my mother. If I’d like, I can use the money to pay for the remainder of my college education. There will be paperwork to sign, and when Michael finds out, he may try to fight it, but everything was done in a completely legal fashion and there shouldn’t be any real problems to overcome.

I look over at Michael and my brothers standing by the door. I ask if my mother left anything to my brothers. Yes, he says. Her will states that they will inherit all of her jewelry. Because Michael gifted a lot of it to her over the years, each of my brothers will probably have enough for a new car or a down payment on a house. It isn’t the same as a trust fund, Mr. Clark says, but they are grown men already living on their own, and the jewelry was really all she had to leave them. Mr. Clark asks how long I’ll be staying in town, and when I tell him I plan to head back to school tomorrow afternoon, he asks if I can come to his office in the morning to sign some papers. The rest we can do over the phone in the coming weeks, he says. As executor of her will, he’ll be bearing most of the responsibility. I shake his hand and thank him and tell him I will see him in the morning.

As he walks out the door, he shakes Ricky’s and Evan’s hands, and they both nod at him knowingly. He walks right past Michael without a second glance. When he is gone, my bothers turn their eyes toward me, and they are both wearing a small smile. They know already. They know what our mother did for us, and I hope that they feel a small amount of regret for their behavior over the past ten years. I hope they remember what an amazing person she once was. I hope they remember the family we used to be.





Chapter Thirty-Eight

Emma—Present Day

My ass is stuck to the couch because I am immobilized by dread. The knock at my door plunged my heart straight down into my stomach, and now I am frozen here, holding my wine glass, knowing that Ricky is just outside my door. A moment passes before my brain kicks in. The instant it does, I put down the glass, run to my bedroom and open the bottom drawer of my nightstand.