I kept coming back to Edward's careful explanation.<\/p>\n
He had never told me to treat the check as an ordinary deposit.<\/p>\n
He had never suggested that the amount made the bank's procedures unnecessary.<\/p>\n
He had explained what the initial examination showed and what still needed to happen.<\/p>\n
At the time, I had wanted something more definite.<\/p>\n
I wanted a final answer.<\/p>\n
I wanted to leave the bank knowing exactly where I stood.<\/p>\n
Now I understood why he had been careful.<\/p>\n
He could tell me what the bank had established.<\/p>\n
He couldn't promise an outcome before the remaining work was complete.<\/p>\n
That was the responsible answer.<\/p>\n
I had to accept it.<\/p>\n
The check itself hadn't changed.<\/p>\n
It still carried Grandma's signature.<\/p>\n
The amount was still six million dollars.<\/p>\n
The account still appeared to contain sufficient funds.<\/p>\n
But I had begun to see how much meaning I was trying to attach to those facts.<\/p>\n
I wanted the check to tell me whether I could trust the situation.<\/p>\n
It could only tell me so much.<\/p>\n
A genuine signature didn't explain a person's motives.<\/p>\n
Sufficient funds didn't explain why the amount had been chosen.<\/p>\n
And a bank's review couldn't settle questions about family relationships.<\/p>\n
I was learning to separate those things.<\/p>\n
It wasn't easy.<\/p>\n
The money was the most visible part of the situation, so it kept drawing my attention.<\/p>\n
The family questions were less concrete.<\/p>\n
There was no number I could examine to determine why Grandma had included us.<\/p>\n
There was no signature card that could reveal what she expected from each recipient.<\/p>\n
I couldn't ask the bank to explain something that belonged to my grandmother.<\/p>\n
I had to recognize the limits of what the institution could tell me.<\/p>\n
That was one lesson from my conversation with Edward.<\/p>\n
The other was that I couldn't treat an unfinished process as a completed decision.<\/p>\n
The bank had additional procedures to follow.<\/p>\n
I needed to wait for those procedures to be completed before assuming the funds would be available.<\/p>\n
I understood that.<\/p>\n
I also knew that waiting would not answer every question.<\/p>\n
The two things could be true at the same time.<\/p>\n
I could trust that the bank was examining the check carefully while remaining uncertain about why Grandma had written it.<\/p>\n
I could recognize the seriousness of the amount without pretending I knew what it meant for the family.<\/p>\n
And I could be grateful that the initial findings were encouraging without acting as though the final outcome was already guaranteed.<\/p>\n
Those distinctions gave me something useful.<\/p>\n
They kept me from jumping ahead.<\/p>\n
I had a habit of wanting the end of a story before I had understood the beginning.<\/p>\n
As a teacher, I sometimes saw students do the same thing.<\/p>\n
They would read a few pages and decide they knew what a character wanted.<\/p>\n
Then they would interpret every later action to fit that first impression.<\/p>\n
I had spent years telling them to be patient.<\/p>\n
Now I was doing exactly what I had warned them against.<\/p>\n
I had decided that the check must have a particular meaning because I wanted the situation to make sense.<\/p>\n
But I hadn't read the whole story.<\/p>\n
I hadn't even heard my grandmother explain her decision.<\/p>\n
I was interpreting a single action without knowing the full circumstances.<\/p>\n
That was not enough.<\/p>\n
I thought about the other recipients again.<\/p>\n
It would have been easy to imagine that the checks meant the same thing to all of us.<\/p>\n
But even if the amounts were equal, the personal meaning might not be.<\/p>\n
My parents would have their own thoughts.<\/p>\n
Eric and Olivia would have theirs.<\/p>\n
Aunt Diane and Uncle Martin would have their own ways of approaching the situation.<\/p>\n
I couldn't decide what any of them should feel.<\/p>\n
I could only acknowledge that Grandma had included them.<\/p>\n
The rest remained unknown.<\/p>\n
I was beginning to accept that uncertainty was not evidence of a problem.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it simply meant that the information wasn't available yet.<\/p>\n
I didn't need to turn every unanswered question into a warning.<\/p>\n
I didn't need to invent a hidden explanation.<\/p>\n
And I didn't need to pretend I was comfortable when I wasn't.<\/p>\n
I could be uncertain and still act carefully.<\/p>\n
That was enough for the moment.<\/p>\n
I kept coming back to Edward's careful explanation. He had never told me to treat the check as an ordinary deposit. He had never suggested that the amount made the … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39273,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39253\/revisions\/39273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}