An hour after I watched my husband’s coffin disappear beneath a layer of dark earth, his daughter walked into my living room with a packet of pink sticky notes.
I noticed them because they were absurdly bright against Diane’s black funeral dress. For one confused second, I assumed she had brought them to label casserole dishes. People from church had filled my kitchen with enough ham, potatoes, rolls, and gelatin desserts to feed Frank’s entire contracting crew from twenty years earlier.
Then Diane peeled off the first note and pressed it onto my china cabinet.
DIANE.
I stared at it.
She moved to the mantel and touched the walnut clock my mother had left me.
Another pink square appeared beneath the brass face.
DIANE.
“Diane,” I said, “what are you doing?”
She didn’t even turn around.
“Just making things easier.”
My husband had been buried sixty-three minutes earlier.
I knew because the kitchen clock said 1:48, and I had looked at my watch when the minister finished beside the grave at 12:45. Frank had been my husband for nineteen years. By sunrise that morning, I had thought the hardest thing I would ever do was stand beside his coffin and hear Pastor Dave speak about a man who would never again complain that I put too much cinnamon in the oatmeal.
I had been wrong.
Diane’s brother Ross came through the hallway carrying a yellow tape measure.
He hooked it across the television stand.
“Fifty-eight,” he said.
Diane glanced over. “That’ll fit.”
I looked from one of them to the other.
“Fit where?”
Ross retracted the tape with a metallic snap.
“My place.”
Behind him, neighbors and relatives pretended not to hear. Mrs. Hendricks, who had lived across the street for thirty-two years, froze with a deviled egg halfway to her mouth. My sister lowered the coffee pot she had been holding.
I thought grief had confused me.
“Why would my television be going to your place?”
Ross gave me the patient expression people use with children who have missed something obvious.
“Dad’s things have to be divided eventually.”
“That television is mine.”
He shrugged. “Dad watched it.”
“So?”
Diane finally faced me.
“Eileen, nobody wants to argue today.”
The remarkable thing was that she said this while holding a pad of labels she was using to claim my possessions.
“I’m not arguing.”
“Good.”
She moved toward Frank’s recliner.
Pink note.
DIANE.
Ross immediately objected.
“I wanted that.”
“You said you wanted the television.”
“I can want both.”
“It won’t fit in your den.”
“I’ll move the bookcase.”
They discussed Frank’s chair as though I had become invisible.
I looked at the recliner.
There was still a shallow depression in the seat cushion from the last afternoon Frank had been strong enough to sit there. His slippers remained beneath the footrest. I had not moved them because moving them felt like admitting he would never need them again.
Diane had placed her name six inches above the worn patch where his hand used to rest.
Something inside me became very still.
“Take that off.”
She glanced at me.
“What?”
“The note.”
“Eileen—”
“Take your name off Frank’s chair.”
Her mouth tightened.
Ross sighed dramatically.
“This is exactly why Dad should’ve settled everything beforehand.”
I almost told him that Frank had settled plenty.
Three weeks earlier, while cancer reduced him to a thin man beneath white sheets, he had asked me a strange question.
“Red, if Diane and Ross come here after I’m gone, what do you think they’ll take first?”
I had been peeling an orange beside his bed.
I thought he was joking.
“Your ugly brass bird.”
Frank smiled.
The bird sat on our bookshelf, a ridiculous little thing with tarnished wings.
“They wouldn’t want that.”
“Nobody wants that.”
“You’ve tried throwing it away three times.”
“Four.”
His smile lasted another moment.
Then he became serious.
“What would they take?”
I put the orange aside.
“Frank.”
“Humor me.”
I had looked around the bedroom.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
I did.
I simply had not wanted to say it.
Frank’s children had spent years talking about his belongings as though inheritance were a reservation system.
Ross liked the truck.
Diane liked Frank’s antique desk.
Both wanted the lake property he had sold before his final illness.
Neither had ever asked what I wanted.
“They’ll probably argue,” I admitted.
Frank closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For making you deal with what I should have dealt with years ago.”
I touched his wrist.
“Your children love you.”
“I know.”
There had been sadness in his answer.
Then he opened his eyes.
“But loving somebody doesn’t automatically make you decent to everyone else.”
I remembered those words while Diane stood in my living room labeling furniture.
She peeled the note from Frank’s chair.
For half a second, I thought she had listened.
Then she pressed it onto the side table instead.
“There.”
My sister made an angry sound.
I caught her eye and shook my head.
Not yet.
Frank had told me something else during that conversation.
“When they show you who they came to be, don’t rescue them from it.”
At the time I thought morphine had made him philosophical.
Now I wondered.
Ross crossed toward the dining room.
“Dad’s silver?”
“Top drawer,” Diane said.
I stepped in front of him.
“No.”
He stopped.
“Excuse me?”
“You are not opening my drawers.”
“Our father bought that silver.”
“My mother gave it to me.”
Ross looked at Diane.
Diane rolled her eyes.
“This is going to take forever.”
I felt grief change shape.
It had been heavy all morning, something I carried behind my ribs.
Now it acquired an edge.
“What exactly do you believe is happening here?”
Diane folded her arms.
“We’re trying to prevent problems later.”
“By putting your name on my mother’s clock?”
Her eyes flicked toward the mantel.
For the briefest instant, something crossed her face.
Not embarrassment.
Alarm.
It vanished quickly.
“I didn’t know that was hers.”
“You never asked.”
“Well, now I know.”
She reached toward the clock.
I moved first.
“Don’t touch it.”
Her hand stopped.
The room had gone quiet.
Diane looked at me differently then.
For nineteen years, I had tried to make peace with her.
I had swallowed jokes about being Frank’s “second attempt.” I had accepted Christmas invitations where my place card appeared at the far end of the table. I had listened while Ross referred to our house as “Dad’s place” even though my name was on the deed.
Frank saw more of it than I wanted him to see.
I defended his children because I knew it hurt him when they behaved badly.
That afternoon, I no longer had a reason to protect him from the truth.
He already knew it.
Maybe he had known it better than I did.
Ross broke the silence.
“Look, Eileen, you’ll obviously keep whatever you need.”
My sister’s eyebrows rose.
“Whatever she needs?”
He ignored her.
“There’s no reason one person needs an entire house full of Dad’s things.”
“One person?”
He gestured vaguely around the room.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I finally do.”
Diane gave him an irritated look, apparently deciding he was handling me badly.
She softened her voice.
“Eileen, we’re grieving too.”
I looked at her black dress.
At the perfect makeup she had reapplied between the cemetery and my house.
At the pink notes.
“I know.”
“Then you understand why we want something of Dad’s.”
“If you had asked for something meaningful, I might.”
Ross frowned.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you measured my television before you asked whether I was all right.”
His cheeks reddened.
“That’s unfair.”
“Is it?”
Nobody answered.
From somewhere behind us, Pastor Dave quietly set down his coffee.
Diane exhaled.
“Fine. We should have waited.”
“Yes.”
“But the estate still has to be handled.”
“Yes.”
“And Dad’s property has to be identified.”
“Yes.”
She looked relieved.
Then I added, “By the executor. With the legal documents. Not by you with office supplies.”
Mrs. Hendricks coughed into her napkin.
Ross glared toward her.
Diane’s face hardened.
“You always do this.”
I blinked.
“Do what?”
“Act innocent.”
There was an old accusation in her voice.
“You spent nineteen years making Dad think we were unreasonable.”
“I never needed to.”
Her face flushed.
“See?”
“I’m not fighting with you at Frank’s funeral reception.”
“Then stop treating us like thieves.”
I looked at the labels.
Ross looked at his tape measure.
My sister muttered, “If the shoe fits.”
Diane ignored her.
“Dad wanted us taken care of.”
“He did.”
That answer surprised her.
“You admit it?”
“Of course.”
Ross stepped closer.
“Then why are you making this difficult?”
“Because being taken care of and taking things are not the same thing.”
He opened his mouth.
Before he could answer, the doorbell rang.
Nobody moved immediately.
Then my sister said, “I’ll get it.”
I remembered Frank’s final week.
He had asked whether the front lock still stuck.
He had asked whether the brass bird had been dusted.
He had asked me to promise I would hold the funeral reception at home instead of the church hall.
At the time, none of those requests seemed connected.
Now the doorbell rang again.
My sister opened the door.
A man in a gray suit stood on the porch holding a black briefcase.
He was perhaps fifty, with silver at his temples and the composed expression of someone arriving exactly when expected.
“Mrs. Eileen Mercer?”
I raised my hand slightly.
“That’s me.”
He stepped inside.
Diane’s face changed.
Ross’s did too.
They recognized him.
I didn’t.
The man looked around my living room.
His gaze passed over the funeral flowers.
Then the sticky notes.
Then Ross’s tape measure.
Something almost like confirmation appeared in his eyes.
He closed the door behind him.
“My name is Aaron Bell.”
Diane whispered, “No.”
Aaron looked directly at her.
“Yes.”
He set his briefcase beside Frank’s recliner.
Then he turned to me.
“Mrs. Mercer, your husband instructed me to arrive at precisely two o’clock if certain events occurred after his funeral.”
I looked at the clock.
1:59.
“What events?”
Aaron’s gaze returned to the pink note on my mother’s clock.
The minute hand clicked forward.
Two o’clock.
He answered quietly.
“Exactly these.”
Click here to continue reading: PART 2: Frank Had Predicted Their Greed So Precisely That the Pink Labels Became Evidence in a Test Nobody Knew Had Begun
Before the Funeral Flowers Had Wilted, Frank’s Children Began Dividing My Home as Though I Had Already Disappeared
Part 1 of 35
