The Shower My Mother In Law Planned
Purvis Dunmore Retires
I had known Purvis Dunmore my whole married life the way you know the furniture in somebody else’s house. He had been the Calloway family’s attorney since before Orlan was born, a small, precise man who wore the same three gray suits in rotation and had drafted every will, every trust, and every land deal that family had ever signed. He had handled my own father’s small estate too, eleven years back, because in a town the size of Cotton Bend there is really only the one firm that does that kind of work properly, and my father had trusted him the way most of the county did.
I had always liked Purvis, in the distant way you like a man who is kind to you at holiday dinners and otherwise belongs entirely to somebody else’s business. I did not expect to hear from him again once I left that house.
He retired from the firm in November, two months after the shower, at seventy four years old, with none of the fanfare a man of his standing in that town might have expected. No dinner at the club. No plaque. Just a short notice in the Cotton Bend paper and a new young lawyer, a man named Whitcombe, taking over the Calloway account within the week.
I did not think much of it until the Tuesday evening in late January when Purvis Dunmore’s old truck pulled up outside my rented rooms above the feed store, and he climbed the outside stairs slower than I remembered, holding his hat in both hands like a man arriving at a funeral he had been dreading.
“Christie,” he said, “I owe you a conversation I should have had with you a long time ago.”
The Second Letter
He sat on the top step because I did not think to invite him in, and for a while he did not say anything at all, just turned his hat over in his hands the way men of his generation do when they are deciding whether a thing is truly theirs to tell.
“I drafted a letter for your mother-in-law once,” he finally said. “About a year before that shower. She wanted me to write language into a family trust distribution, something that would look, on paper, like an ordinary gift to Orlan and his future children. What it actually was, was a way to fund a settlement for you and a very generous, very quiet arrangement with a family out on Highway 82, all under one clean umbrella so nobody outside that room would ever have to connect the two.”
“The Reyburns,” I said.
“The Reyburns,” he agreed. “She’d had her eye on that frontage for three years, Christie. Old man Reyburn wasn’t selling to a lumberyard. He was never going to sell to a company. But a man will do things for family that he will not do for money, and Hazel understood that better than anybody I ever drafted a will for.”
He told it to me plainly, without relish, the way a man tells you something that has been sitting on his conscience so long it has lost its shape as gossip and become simply a fact he is finally allowed to say out loud.