The Lake House That Was Never Theirs

I did not argue. I did not cry, not then. I told them I needed to think, and I walked down to the end of the dock I had rebuilt board by board and sat there until the sun went down over the water, until the crickets started up in the pines behind me, until I was cold enough that my hands had gone stiff around my knees.

That night I called my best friend from nursing school, who left teaching for law school three years after I didn’t, and who has never once in fifteen years let me talk myself out of something I had every right to be angry about.

“They can’t sell a house that isn’t theirs to sell,” she said, once I’d gotten the whole thing out. “Did your grandfather leave a will?”

I told her I honestly didn’t know. Nobody in my family had ever discussed it plainly. There had always been a vague understanding that the house would “stay in the family,” which I had taken to mean it belonged to all of us in some unspoken, undivided way, the way people assume things without ever actually checking.

She called me back the next afternoon while I was still at school, grading spelling tests at my desk during my planning period, and her voice had a note in it I hadn’t heard from her since she passed the bar exam.

“Rolla,” she said. “Your grandfather filed a will. Nine years ago, with an attorney in Tupelo, notarized and everything. I pulled the county probate record myself this morning.”

“And?”