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“So, pretty much as expected,” Lou’s mother said reinforcing what the letter said.
“It looks so,” Lou’s father said receiving the letter from his friend.
I looked over at Lou who was incredibly confused. Fighting to get the words out, he said,
“That’s not right.”
“Of course it’s right,” his mother protested. “You heard it, didn’t you? What were you expecting? That she would leave everything to you?” she said with a laugh.
I looked at Lou for his response. He looked stunned. Lou, needing answers, turned to his brother. For once, Chris wasn’t an asshole. The look he gave Lou simply said, ‘What did you expect from them?’
Lou got up and headed for the back door.
“And where do you think you’re going?” his mother chided with an aura of superiority.
Lou took off his jacket and flung it to the ground.
“Louis,” his mother called. “Louis!”
“Let him go, Martha,” his father said silencing his wife.
I looked around at the joke of a family and hurried out after him. I didn’t catch up to him until we were approaching the pool.
“Lou, you okay? Lou?”
“They changed the will. I don’t know how, but they did,” he finally said as we passed the pool and headed for the back lawn.
“You think so?”
Lou stopped and practically burned a hole in me with his eyes.
“Titus, my whole life my grandmother told me to prepare for when I inherited everything. My whole life! Now they’re saying that in her final weeks she suddenly changed her mind? That doesn’t even make sense.
“And what about switching to my father’s law firm?”
“Is that weird?” I asked innocently.
“My grandmother was an author! Two years ago she sat me down and explained that her lawyer specialized in managing the intellectual property of authors after they were gone. Her talking about dying brought me to tears. There was no way I would forget that situation. And just like that, she’s going to replace him with a firm that specialized in litigation? That’s nuts!”
Lou turned away and continued to storm off. I didn’t know what to say. Lou was implying that his parents stole his inheritance. How did I respond to that? Certainly, his mother seemed capable of it. But could even the worst mother actually do something like that to their child?
I continued following Lou across the lawn to the woods behind it. About to enter the trees, Lou turned around and stared at the estate. I stood next to him.
“What are you thinking? Should we burn it down?” I asked half-seriously.
“Would you like to know how my family first made their money?”
“How?” I asked having an idea considering we were in the south.
“Cotton. “Just like the great President Andrew Jackson did,” my granddad always said. Whenever he was questioned about the morality of slavery, he always brought up “The people’s president!”
“But it wasn’t just slavery. One of my great, great, great grandfathers saw the civil war coming and convinced his father to invest in iron mines and processing factories. That worked out well for him because once the Civil War broke out, he supplied the south with guns. War is always good for business so he made a fortune.
“Then when the south lost and cotton became less profitable – you know, because plantation owners had to pay their workers – my family transitioned to exploiting miners and putting eight-year-olds to work in their factories.
“Yep, my family has had a long and distinguished history,” Lou concluded mockingly.
I listened shocked. I had no idea what to say to all of that. I knew Lou’s family was rich and, it being the south, I guessed it was old money. But, I had no idea what that meant.
