The attorney in town told me straight across his desk. We might win it. In fact he thought we probably would, in the end, if it came to that.
If we could prove the lease was a true fifty-fifty and the premium was shared, he figured a judge would most likely order the proceeds split.
“But understand me, it’ll take a year,” he said. “Could run you two. Retainer up front, more as we go. And these family ones, they turn ugly, and they drag.”
I carried all of it back home to Mama’s kitchen and laid it out flat on the table. She sat and listened to the whole thing through.
Her hands stayed folded on the oilcloth the entire time. She did not interrupt me once, which is not like her.
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“So,” she said when I had run down. “If I want the law to reach in and make him hand it back.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then I have got to spend a year, maybe two, suing my own boy. Depositions, lawyers, a courtroom. My grandbabies reading my name against his in the county paper.”
“That is about the size of it, Mama. I’m sorry.”
“And maybe at the far end of all that I get my money back. And maybe I don’t. And either way I have burned that boy down in front of God and the whole county.”
“That’s about the size of that part too.”
She nodded slow, taking it in. Then she pushed up from the table and opened the cabinet where she keeps the flour and the sugar and the big tin of lard.
She started setting things out on the counter one at a time. The yellow crockery bowl. The old sifter. Her own mother’s wooden rolling pin, worn pale and smooth in the middle.
“I am not going to court over this,” she said, with her back to me. “But I will tell you what I am also not going to do. I am not going to pretend it never happened.”
“Then what in the world are you going to do, Mama?”
“There is a middle road through this,” she said. “And I do believe I am going to walk it.”
“What middle road? I don’t see one.”
“Thirty-eight thousand dollars,” she said, turning to face me. “That comes to thirty-eight pies, the way I count. And Donnie’s church is holding their fall potluck a week from Sunday.”