The Inheritance I Had Not Earned
Then I shook my head. “No. Pop’s will says his children, and it isn’t mine to claim more because of what I did. I didn’t do it for pay. I did it for him. Fifty-fifty, the way Pop would have wanted.”
Keith set down the pen. “It’s not a wage, Sandy. It was never for sale. It’s me trying to put a little of it right, and it’s the smallest piece. I know there’s no number that fits. But the alternative is I do nothing and live with that, and I don’t think I can.”
It was Aunt Joyce who settled it. She had come out the kitchen door with her purse on her arm to say her goodbyes, and she had stood behind us for who knows how long.
“Sandra Jean,” she said. She was eighty-two and had buried a husband and two siblings. “Let the man do one thing. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone who’s sorry is let them pay. It’s not for you. If you won’t take a thing from him, he has nowhere to put it down.”
I thought about that a long time. I think it was the wisest thing anyone said all week.
“Fifty-five, forty-five,” I said finally.
“Sixty-forty,” said Keith.
“I counted the turnings too, Keith. I was there.” I smiled, and he smiled, and Joyce said “Lord, the Vogts” under her breath and went to find her keys.
We settled in the middle, the way Vogts do. I would take the house and the forty acres at the appraisal, and Keith would take the savings, the truck, and the machinery. When Mr. Finley at the law office on Main Street ran the numbers that Tuesday, the whole estate came to four hundred and fifty-two thousand dollars, and our handshake landed me a hair over fifty-five percent. Mr. Finley only typed what we had already decided. He said he had never drawn up papers for two siblings so eager to hand each other the bigger half.
On Monday morning Marcy came in the white van with a young man to do the lifting. Keith, who had called in sick to his nine o’clock for the first time in anyone’s memory, said, “No, I’ll help.” I watched my brother take one end of the frame and walk my father’s bed down the ramp Harlan had built and into the back of the van.
The front room, empty, looked as big as a church.
“One more thing,” Keith said on the porch, and nodded toward the machine shed. Harlan’s truck was already pulling in, with Tyler beside him and Harlan’s two grown boys in the bed. “Mama’s piano. Dad told me once he was sorry he’d moved it. He said you played every Sunday, before. I figure the front room’s where it ought to be.”
It took six of us and a dolly. It stood by the window where it had stood in 1974, half its keys stuck and badly out of tune. I hadn’t touched it in seven years.
I sat down on the bench with my back screaming and played the only hymn my fingers remembered, “Abide With Me.” It came out crooked. Keith stood behind me and sang the bass line a quarter-tone flat. Harlan took off his feed cap. When I reached the last verse I felt something I had not felt in six years and seven months. My shoulders came down.