Page 10 of The Drifter

They laid it out very kind, the way you'd explain something to a child.

The property on Wadmalaw had come down through my great-grandmother and had never been probated. Not once. Not by her and not by my grandmother and not by anyone since, because when the land came into that family there was no lawyer in that county who would take our money to write it up right. So, it got handed down the way everything got handed down out there—by knowing. By everybody knowing whose porch was whose. My great-grandmother's name went on a deed in 1912. After that, there were no more deeds, only children.

Which meant that on paper, the fourteen acres belonged to my aunt and my cousins and my second cousins and a man in Atlanta I have met twice and about thirty other people, all of them owning a slice of everything and none of them owning anything at all.

And any one of those thirty could sell their slice.

And once a stranger owns a slice, the stranger can go to a judge and ask that the whole thing be sold, because you can't very well saw a marsh in half.

They had the word for it right there in the letter. Partition. They used it the way a doctor uses a word.

My cousin in Atlanta had already signed.

I read that paragraph four times. I sat on my paid-for sofa in my paid-for condo with the harbor going about its business outside my paid-for window, and I read it four times.

They were offering to buy me out. That was the opportunity. They would pay me for my share of a place where my grandmother shucked oysters into a bucket between her knees and taught me the word for the tide going out. The number they put next to my name was not a small number, and they knew it wasn't, and they had chosen it carefully. It was less than I had in savings.

That's what I kept coming back to. It was less than I had in the bank.

I could have written a check. I could have paid every back tax on that ground and hired the meanest lawyer in Charleston County and probated the whole tangled mess of it. And I could have done it out of the account I'd built by never going anywhere and never buying anything and never taking a single one of the vacation days I accrued each year. I would still have had my condo and my furniture and my five pink blouses.

Fourteen acres. Marsh and hummock and a bent-over live oak my mother was married under.

I could have saved it.

And I sat there with the letter in my hands and understood, cold and clear, that saving it would take a person who could stand in a courtroom in Charleston County with thirty relatives' names on a piece of paper and say this is mine. I didn’t know if I was that person, because I have never once in my life said mine out loud about anything except a two-bedroom box in the sky that I bought with money I earned by giving other people what was theirs.

Somebody's always looking, baby.

I called my aunt.

Verlie picked up on the fourth ring, the way she always does, because she is a woman who does not run for a telephone.

"There she is," she said. "Miss Charleston."

"Don't start."

"I ain't started."

And we talked about nothing for a while, the way you do—her flowers, the church, a boy of my cousin's who had gotten himself arrested over foolishness and gotten himself out again. She asked if I was eating. I said I was eating. She asked if I was seeing anybody and I said Aunt Verlie, and she made a sound in her throat, and neither of us said anything else about it.

I never mentioned the letter.

She'd have gotten one. She'd have gotten the same letter, on the same paper, with a smaller number on it, and she had not brought it up either. The two of us sat there on the phone in that silence for a good ninety seconds, listening to each other not say it, over a hundred years of ground.

"You come out here," she said, finally. "You ain't been out here."

"I know."

"Water don't wait on you, Sasha."

After she hung up, I stood at the window a long time.

The harbor went on out there, doing what it does, going out and coming back and going out. Somewhere off to the south, past the lights and the container cranes and the last of the city, that water ran up into a creek and around a bend and into a marsh where my people had been standing a very long time.

I thought about the leather book on the desk. The arrivals page. The Magnolia Suite held open, comped, skeleton housekeeping, nobody goes in.

The blank column where the name should have gone.