Nine Calls From My Hospital Bed

The lawyer at the foot of the bed

Teresa was the one who dialed it. My hands were not steady enough and the ICU phone was a landline anyway. I gave her the number off my own phone, from the contact saved as “Oakes and Pruitt, Estate.” I told her I needed to reach Warren Oakes personally and that it did not matter what time it was.

She raised her eyebrows, but she dialed. And she stood there while I talked, and I was glad of her.

Warren Oakes is a careful man in his sixties who has drawn up half the wills in this county. I had done business with him for eleven years. When he understood where I was calling from, he went quiet, and then he said, “Carol, I’m going to come to you. Don’t do anything on the phone. Some things ought to be done in person, and this is one of them.”

He drove out from Hays that evening. It was maybe forty minutes. He came into the ICU a little after eight o’clock in a gray suit with a leather folder under his arm, and he set his briefcase on the chair and he looked at me for a long moment, at the tube and the lines and the machine breathing beside me, and I watched him do the arithmetic of the day on his face.

“You don’t have to do this tonight,” he said gently. “It’ll keep. You should rest.”

“No,” I said. My voice came out like a rasp, like something dragged over gravel, because of the tube that had been down my throat. “It won’t keep. Because if I don’t do it tonight, I’ll wake up tomorrow and I’ll talk myself out of it, the way I’ve talked myself out of it for thirty years. Do it tonight, Warren. While I still know exactly what they did.”

He pulled the chair around to the side of the bed, and he opened the folder, and he did the thing that lawyers do, which is to make sure you are of sound mind. He asked me the date. He asked me who the president was. He asked me to state my full name and to confirm that I was making these changes freely, without anyone forcing me. Teresa signed as a witness, and a respiratory therapist named Doug who happened to be on that night signed as the second, and Warren notarized it himself with a little stamp he carried in his breast pocket like a man who had learned to always be ready.

Then he read it to me. Every change, aloud, in that flat lawyer’s cadence, and I made him read all of it so that I would hear every word of it leave my old life.

What I changed

My mother and my father were removed as beneficiaries. All of it. The trust that would have paid out to them, the life insurance that named them, the small monthly annuity I had quietly set up two years earlier to make sure they would never want for anything in their last years, the one they did not even know existed. Gone. Struck through in Warren’s neat pen and initialed by me with a hand that had a needle taped into the back of it.

Shelby was removed entirely. The education trusts I had funded for her three children, the ones my mother had already spent in her imagination, the ones that were the whole reason my family had decided I would leave everything to Shelby’s kids, because what else would a childless woman do. Gone.

The home place, my grandmother’s quarter with the white farmhouse and the seed shed, which my parents assumed would go to Shelby’s oldest boy someday because he was the one with the Denning name, I redirected. I left it, all of it, the nine hundred acres and the storage sites and the business and the farmhouse, to be sold, and the proceeds placed into a foundation.

I named the foundation after my grandmother. Eleanor Denning. It would fund seed and equipment grants for young farmers in the county who were trying to start out with nothing but a rented quarter and a good year, the way she had once bet on me. Warren wrote it all down and read it back and I said yes to every line.