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Last night was good. Really, really good. But I didn’t do relationships, and neither did he. We had a thing. It was a good thing, but it was just a thing. Not a sappy, messy commitment.
We were on the final few products for the catalog, which included a strapless bra and one with criss-crossed straps. When we finally took a break, I sipped my lemon water and stared at my phone, pondering for the thousandth time whether I should text Andrew. As I was moping over it, the phone rang in my hand.
It was my mother. I did a quick calculation: It was around noon in Colorado. What the hell was she calling me for?
“Hey Mom,” I said when I answered, trying not to sound put out.
“I can’t believe you,” my mother said.
I frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“The money.” My mother usually had a chill hippie attitude, but she could get petty and angry. Right now she was both. “You’re just going to keep it, aren’t you? You’re not going to share any of it with me.”
“What money?”
She made a disbelieving sound. “You’re going to pretend you don’t know about the money? I talked to the lawyer, Tessa. He said he sent you a letter about it.”
The lawyer had sent me a letter? If it had come to my grandmother’s house, I hadn’t seen it. But then again, I hadn’t been home yesterday. I’d worked all day and all night, then I’d stayed the night at Andrew’s. “Wait a minute,” I said to Mom. “You’re saying that aside from the house, Grandma left me money?”
“Allof her money,” Mom said. “Including the money left to her when my father died and she got a life insurance payout. She left you everything, and she didn’t leave any of it to her own daughter.”
I blinked in shock. I realized I was standing in the dressing room in my underwear, and I grabbed a robe and pulled it on, wrapping it around me. “I didn’t know about the money, Mom,” I said. “I swear I didn’t.”
“Well,” she said, only half believing me, “I’m a little short right now, and I need funds. If you could send some, it would be great. Considering it’s really both of our inheritance.”
I opened my mouth, and the words that were going to come out were the ones without thinking:Yes Mom, sure, of course you’re right. The words were right there on my tongue. And then I stopped myself.
I hadn’t known my grandmother. I’d never talked to her. I didn’t know her before she died. Whose fault was that? My mother’s, for sure. Maybe my grandmother’s, too. Maybe all three of us took some of the blame.
The point was, I didn’t have the chance to ask what my grandmother was thinking. But instead of that, her will left a pretty clear message.
“Grandma didn’t want you to have her money,” I told Mom. “She wanted me to have it.”
“Don’t be silly, Tessa. Of course my mother wanted me to have some of that money.”
“Then why didn’t she leave it to you in the will?”
“We were having a bit of an argument, that’s all. We weren’t getting along.”
“Mom, you weren’t getting along with Grandma fortwenty-seven years.”
“She had a closed mind,” Mom said. “She didn’t understand your father and me.”
I thought about my grandmother in that house, watching her pregnant nineteen-year-old daughter drive away with her boyfriend forever, telling her to fuck off as she went. “Maybe she didn’t understand, but probably because she was worried about you. She didn’t want you to make a mistake.”
“So you’re taking sides, then?”
Again, the words tried to come out:No, of course not, I’ll do what you want, sorry. But I could feel a current of something stubborn and resistant in my blood. Maybe it was anger; maybe it was the spirit of my grandma, telling me what her wishes were. “So you left your mom, you cut her out of your life, you kept her granddaughter away from her, and now you think she owes you her money?” I said. “I think maybe she’d disagree.”
Mom was starting to get angry now. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. You don’t understand anything.”
“How many times did she call you, Mom?” I said. “How many times did she beg to have a relationship with you again over the last twenty-seven years? And a relationship with me?”
Mom was silent, which answered my question.
“A dozen?” I asked her. “A hundred? You were her only child, and I was her only grandchild, and you made the decision to cut us off.Youdid that. You didn’t even go to the funeral when your dad died. Grandma lived the rest of her life a lonely old lady, and she died alone. And now you think you should get her money.”
“I don’t know what’s happened to you,” Mom said. “I didn’t raise you to be disrespectful.”
