Personal Effect Read online

reading was over and we were moving through the lawyer’s office he pulled me aside as my sister and brother were walking out the door.

  “I’m sorry. Your mother never explained to me why she wanted to cut you out of her will. I asked her to offer some explanation but all she would tell me was, ‘she doesn’t want anything from me.’ I did not believe that to be true but my hands were tied. I hope you understand Sarah.”

  “I do Mr. Sharon, and thank you. My mother was a difficult person and we were not close, as you know. I’m not at all surprised. I just wish she had told Mike or Anne so I could have saved myself the trip. I only came because Mike insisted.”

  “There was one thing,” he said as he pulled an envelope, plain and white and cheap, from his breast pocket. “Your mother gave me this just a few days before she died. It’s addressed to you.”

  I thanked him again and then met my siblings in the hallway. We stood there looking at each other in an uncomfortable silence until my brother suggested we all go somewhere for lunch. I told them I had to get back home, that I had to work that evening. I didn’t but now that my mother’s refusal to acknowledge me in her will left me feeling completely disconnected to both of them. I simply didn’t want to sit in a restaurant with them for an hour or more making small talk. I didn’t want to hear all the reasons they thought my mother disinherited me. We really had nothing else to say to one another.

  “I’m just going to go then. I’ll talk to you both soon,” I said as I kissed them both goodbye, a pro-forma expression of familial devotion that none of us really felt. I took the stairs down to the building’s back entrance and walked a couple of blocks to where I had parked my ten year old, hunter green Outback, a car that I cherished and loved, not least of all because it was the first thing I ever owned that was just mine. I wanted to keep it forever. I climbed in and suddenly felt lighter, much less burdened by obligation or any residual sense of devotion to my mother or her memory. I opened the envelope and unfolded the letter from my mother.

  Dear Sarah,

  It seems silly for either of us to pretend that I could forgive you for everything you’ve done to hurt this family.

  The first thing that struck me was that it was typewritten. My mother’s script was so easily identifiable, beautiful, almost lyrical looking. In the last months of her life she refused to see me but I knew that she was unable to move very much at all. She couldn’t write and she certainly couldn’t have typed this. Someone must have done it for her. I wondered if it was Anne. She wove her words together as I’m sure she thought of them, in a kind of blithe and disaffected manner, as if there were nothing at all wrong with the statement that I had done so much to hurt the family. I put the letter back in the envelope without reading any further and left it there. I put the Outback in gear and headed home. I shoved the letter in a kitchen drawer in the hope that I would forget about it. I wanted to keep it, to read it all eventually, but not now. Not yet.

  When Mike and Anne decided to sell the lake house it was Anne’s daughter, Kathy that called to tell me what the plans were. Or rather, what my role in the plans would be.

  “Mom thought that since you live the closest it wouldn’t be any problem for you to clear out the house and get it ready to sell. She and Uncle Mike said that they thought they’d leave the furniture to go with the place and you could just take out all the little things like books, pictures fishing poles and all that stuff,” she said.

  “And how does your mother think I’m going to get all of that stuff out? Where am I supposed to put it all?” I wasn’t really mad at Kathy, although to be truthful I did not care for my oldest niece at all. She was a spoiled, undisciplined brat when she was a child, a surly and entitled teenager, which would have been forgivable if she had grown up and become anything other than an arrogant and self-absorbed adult. Add to that her mother’s unattractive habit of belittling anyone who disagreed with her and I could find very little that was appealing about the girl.

  “I dunno Aunt Sara. Ask mom if you need more instructions.” And with that she hung up in my ear.

  I can’t really fault her though, as much as I dislike her. She is a product of her mother’s arrogance and her grandmother’s indulgence. I only ever saw her at Christmas, I only ever saw any of my family at Christmas really and up until my mother’s death that struck me as somehow sad, like we all should have tried harder to like each other. But now it seemed like all of these ties were loosening from me, some undefined freedom was emerging. Standing in the lake house now, looking at ‘all that stuff’ that Kathy obligingly told me I was to shift I felt, finally and gladly, apart from it. I found a phone book in the kitchen and called a local storage service. They told me they could bring one of those storage pods over, I could load it up and they would take it away and keep it for us for less than one-hundred dollars a month. Then they asked me if I wanted to pay in advance or if they should bill the estate. The owner had known my mother and knew how to get the bill to her attorney and thus to my brother. I couldn’t help but smile broadly. I told them to bill the estate. Mike would have three heart attacks when he got it and Anne would burst at the seams until she could yell at me for it but damned if I would pay for the privilege of cleaning out their house. I was beyond caring how they felt.

  In the few days that followed my conversation with Kathy I was determined I wasn’t going to come out here at all. I had no stake in the dissolution of this property and I honestly couldn’t think of a single thing that I wanted from it. There were no mementos, no pictures or childhood trinkets that I wanted to keep. I didn’t think that there would be anything I’d want at my mother’s condo in Myrtle Beach or at the larger townhouse she’d been living in since my father died either. My mother wasn’t sentimental. She didn’t really hang on to things. Any family detritus that was accumulated over the years was accumulated here, in this house by the lake. Anyway I wasn’t invited to come and help clean out those other places. For those my brother hired a service to store everything so they could go through it later and I assumed that I would be invited to participate but I wasn’t entirely sure that I would. I doubt my mother kept anything of mine that I might want to cherish. Not after everything that happened between us.

  In the end I gave in and agreed to come here and do what I was asked to do. Anne sent me a birthday card, something she had never done. It was an oversized, yellow and pink affair that featured a cartoon dog on the front while inside harbored the smarmy greeting, “No bones about it, hope you have a great birthday!!!” penned in garish red ink. The card was well suited to an eight-year old or an elderly parent but certainly not a thirty-seven year old woman with whom you had nothing in common and for whom you had almost no affection. It was almost comforting to realize that she probably put very little thought into it. She may have had it lying around in her ‘gift wrapping room.’ Anne was the sort of woman who collected cards and cellophane bows and all sizes of boxes and who bought wrapping paper and ribbons by the carload. These were carefully stored on plastic shelves in a room in her house painted bright pink that was set aside for gift wrapping.

  Enclosed in the card were two, one-hundred dollar bills and a short note saying that she didn’t think it was fair that I should do all the work at mom’s house and not get anything out of it. “And besides, I’m sure there must be all sorts of stuff you probably need but can never buy, so treat yourself!” This was so typical of Anne. She assumed that because I had rejected what she thought of as an important and meaningful life to define that for myself alongside my sense of self-worth as a writer, that I was both destitute and stupid. I tore up the ridiculous card but I kept the money. I didn’t put it in the bank though. I gave it to one of the servers who had tripped leaving the restaurant one evening, breaking her toe in the process. She had just returned to work after three weeks off and needed the money. That night I talked to the owner of the restaurant, Gladys, whom I had known for more than fifteen years and she was more than happy to let me have some time
off. I never took a vacation. Two days later, I left for the lake.

  You may not think that there is anything left to say. I really don’t know if I’ll even give this letter to you or if I will keep my thoughts to myself. What happened in this family has been a source of great pain and anger for me Sarah, and I hold you responsible.

  While the letter sat in that drawer in my kitchen I didn’t think about its being there every day, just considered it occasionally. I knew I’d read it eventually. Being alone at the lake house seemed as good a time as any to do so. While I was throwing books and my laptop into my book bag preparing to come here, I took the letter out of its drawer and shoved it to the bottom of the bag.

  My intention was to only spend a couple of days putting things into boxes and marking the boxes and bags for clarity and then having it all removed. I told myself I was coming to the lake to write and that the task of removing our family’s belongings was the price of a week’s retreat. I soon found that there was actually much more in the house than I’d originally thought. Being left out of the decision to sell did not endear the house’s