The stale smell of ginger ale and damp flannel always stays in the back of your throat when you spend three months watching someone die in a front bedroom. My sister Corinne had lived in that low-slung brick house off the Old Knoxville Highway since 1988, back when the valley still had more cattle than subdivisions.
By the time February rolled around, she weighed maybe eighty pounds, and her skin had that yellow tint that doesn’t leave once the pancreas packs it in.
I spent most of my days sitting in the vinyl armchair in the corner, keeping my mouth shut while the world shrank down to the hum of the oxygen machine and the rattle of pill bottles on the nightstand. Corinne raised her daughter Talia by herself after her shift-work husband cleared out for Texas back when the girl was still in diapers. They had an understanding, those two. Talia went to nursing school on night shifts at the county hospital, paid her own way with a stacked schedule, and came home every morning to empty bedpans and check her mother’s pulse before she even took off her scrubs.
The aunts, Bernadine and Faye, showed up twice during the whole three months Corinne was bedridden. The first time was in March with a lukewarm tuna casserole that tasted mostly of store-bought celery salt. The second time was a Tuesday afternoon when they brought a man in a gray suit who carried a leather briefcase and smelled faintly of clove gum. They told Corinne he was just an old friend from church stopping by to check on her spiritual welfare.
I should have asked for that man’s card. That is my regret in all this. I sat right there by the closet door sharpening my pocketknife on an oil stone, and I let them close the bedroom door for twenty minutes while Corinne was too weak to lift her head off the bolster pillow.
When Corinne finally passed on a damp Monday night, Bernadine and Faye moved with the kind of practiced speed you usually see at a livestock auction. They didn’t call me to help coordinate anything. They called the local pastor, they picked out a plot behind the old Methodist fellowship hall where the drainage is terrible, and they set the funeral for Wednesday at ten in the morning.
Right after the service, they scheduled the formal reading of the will down at Mr. Aldridge’s office on Main Street.
Talia was on the phone with Bernadine when the arrangements were finalized. The speaker was on because Talia was busy trying to measure out liquid morphine for her mother’s final hours, and I heard every flat, calculated word come through that little plastic speaker.
“Don’t feel bad, honey, you can grieve on your own time,” Bernadine told her, her voice dripping with that heavy, fake sugar they use at church suppers. “We understand you can’t just leave your shift at the hospital. We’ll handle everything downtown and let you know what you got.”
What you got. Like Talia was some stray dog waiting on the back porch for scraps.
Talia didn’t yell or drop the medicine dropper. She just stared at the wall above the dresser where Corinne’s old high school graduation portrait hung in a warped wooden frame.
“I understand,” Talia said, and her voice didn’t shake once.
She hung up the phone and walked over to the kitchen table where I was shelling pecans from the tree out back. Her hands were steady, but her eyes looked like hard river glass.
“Mama told me something back in March,” Talia said, her voice barely louder than the hum of the refrigerator. “She made me promise not to say a single word until the day of the service.”
I stopped cracking the shell in my fingers. “What did she tell you, darlin’?”
Talia didn’t look at me right away. She picked up a stray piece of pecan shell and flicked it across the linoleum. “She said Bernadine and Faye brought that man here with the briefcase to get her to sign some papers while she was medicated. She said she refused, but she knew they weren’t done trying. She made me memorize the office number for Mr. Aldridge, and she gave me one exact sentence to hold onto for when they tried to lock me out.”
“What sentence?” I asked, leaning in.
“When they try to keep you out of the room, you call him yourself,” Talia whispered, quoting her mother down to the precise cadence. “Don’t wait to be invited.”
Mr. Aldridge was the real estate and estate attorney who had drawn up Corinne’s papers back when she first bought the brick house thirty-six years ago. He was old school, sharp as a tack, and he didn’t care much for Bernadine’s church circle or their fancy notions about how things ought to be handled in the county.
The morning of the funeral, the weather was heavy and gray, the kind of southern humidity that makes your shirt stick to your shoulder blades before you even get out of the truck. Bernadine and Faye sat right up front in the third row, both of them decked out in brand new black dresses they probably charged to some department store card in Knoxville. Bernadine kept glancing down at her gold wristwatch every two minutes, counting down the minutes until ten o’clock when the office downtown would open and they could read whatever document they had managed to cook up with that notary friend of theirs.
They thought Talia was three miles away across town, punching charts at the nurse’s station in the west wing.
They didn’t know Talia had traded shifts with a nurse named Brenda three days prior, pulling a double overnight just to clear her morning. And they certainly didn’t know she had placed a private call to Mr. Aldridge’s office at eight o’clock that very morning.
The heavy wooden doors at the back of the church creaked open right at nine-fifty.
Talia walked down the center aisle wearing her mother’s old black wool coat from the seventies, the one with the velvet collar that always smelled faintly of cedar. Both aunts whipped their heads around at the exact same second. Bernadine’s jaw went slack, and her face lost every bit of color, looking like a piece of bleached flour sack.
Talia didn’t stop at the folding chairs in the back where I was sitting. She walked right past the fifth row, stepped into the family section, and sat down dead center in the front pew, right beside Bernadine.
She didn’t look at either of them. She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out her phone, and tapped the screen twice.
The phone was already ringing when she stood back up and walked slowly down the side aisle toward the quiet of the vestibule, holding the device directly to her ear.
I watched through the open double doors as she pushed through the heavy wood and stepped outside into the damp morning air, her thumb pressing the speaker button just as a deep, familiar voice answered on the other end.
Mr. Aldridge didn’t waste time on pleasantries. His voice carried clearly across the polished pine floor of the empty church nave, bouncing off the hymnals and the empty altar rails.
“Talia?” the old lawyer said, loud enough for everyone in the front three rows to hear every syllable. “I’m looking right at the certified copy of your mother’s actual last will and testament from February twelfth. Your aunts are down here in my waiting room right now with some homemade paper they want me to file, but I told them they’re wasting their time. Your mother left the house, the truck, and every cent in the operating account to you, and she named you sole executor. When are you getting down here to sign?”
Bernadine stood up so fast her church fan hit the pew with a sharp crack, her face turning a dark, mottled purple as she looked around the empty church for somewhere to hide.
