Mr. Pruitt mailed the notices by certified mail on January 3rd.
Carol called me on the 6th, at seven in the morning. Jeanette told me later that Carol had signed for the envelope on a Saturday, standing in the doorway of her beige colonial in a pink robe, holding a cup of tea.
“Linda.” Her voice was thin and shaking. For the first time in forty years, I heard it without any polish. “What have you done?”
“Hello, Carol.”
“A notice came from Dennis Pruitt. It says Mom left the farm to you.”
“Yes.”
“That can’t be right. She’d never… Linda, she wasn’t in her right mind at the end.”
“Dr. Okonkwo says she was.”
“Dr. who?”
“Her physician. He signed a statement about her mental capacity the week before she signed the will. There were two witnesses and a notary.” I kept my voice level. “I have copies.”
A long, hard silence.
“You manipulated her.”
“I drove her to dialysis for four years.”
“She was old and lonely, and you got in her ear and took advantage of…”
“Carol. Did you ever visit her on a Tuesday?”
Silence.
“She had dialysis on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays,” I said. “Forty minutes each way. Four hours in the chair. Six hundred and twenty-four round trips. I drove every one.” I paused. “I’m not saying this to hurt you. I’m saying it because you asked what I did.”
I could hear her breathing, and far away, a clock ticking in a big beige kitchen.
“I didn’t know she was that sick,” Carol said finally.
“I know.”
“She never told me.”
“She didn’t tell anybody.”
“If I’d known, I would have…”
“Would you?”
The line went quiet.
I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t gloat. I didn’t say the word jam. I didn’t bring up forty Christmases of laughter, or a jar tossed underhand across a kitchen. I sat at my own table with a cup of black coffee and let a woman I’d known for forty years work through it alone on the other end of the line.
“I’m going to talk to a lawyer,” Carol said. “In Des Moines. A real one.”
“That’s your right.”
“I’ll contest it.”
“Mr. Pruitt says the deadline to object is in the notice,” I said. “You should read it carefully.”
Another long silence.
“Linda.” Her voice had gone small. “Is it true about the jars? Jeanette says you found something in them.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Savings bonds. One for every Christmas. And bank receipts for the later years.”
“How much?”
“I haven’t cashed them yet.”
“But how much?”
I thought about it. Not the arithmetic. The jar.
“Carol, I’d like to tell you something, and I’d like you to really hear it. Your mother gave you jewelry because you loved jewelry. She gave Jeanette the quilts because Jeanette loved quilts. She gave me jam because I never once asked her for anything.” I swallowed. “I don’t think she was choosing between us. I think she was giving each of us what she thought we’d keep.”
A long, thick silence.
“That’s not fair,” Carol said, and her voice cracked. “I kept the jewelry. I wore it. I wore it for her.”
“I know you did.”
“I loved her.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t she…”
She couldn’t finish.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she was afraid you’d say no.”
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
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