Once more I qualify this latest product: Early draft, early draft, early draft. Raw and quite possibly rife with typos and moments of “huh?” I’ll say no more… other than comments/criticism not only welcome, but solicited. Dive in.
Will’s plan had been to nurse his breakfast for as long as he could to cut down the time he’d have to wait for the bank to open. This idea was abandoned the instant the waitress turned her back. Though he’d lost his appetite, he knew he needed the food. He attacked the sprawling meal that contested the limits of the plate. He shoveled forkful after forkful into his mouth, only sipping enough coffee to propel the food down his throat when his mouth got too dry to swallow. When the waitress showed up for a refill he waved her away, and hoped his bulging cheeks would discourage any attempt at conversation. It appeared to have worked, and when she finally came by with the check, barely a quarter of the food that was delivered remained on the plate. Making a show of chewing, he gave a nod and jammed a piece of toast between his teeth. She didn’t linger. He dropped the fork in relief and bolted the last tepid dregs from the cup. After a few deep breaths, he tucked the check and a twenty-dollar bill—an almost one hundred per cent tip– under the edge of the plate. He wasn’t going to risk a clean getaway by getting hung up at the cash register.
Will slid out of the booth and directly into a brisk walk toward the door. He caught the waitress in the periphery of his vision, taking an order at a center table. As she turned toward him, he waved. “Thanks, gotta run. It’s all on the table.” He was at the door just as somebody coming in pulled it open. With a cheery, “Muchas gracias!” he slipped through. Pulling out his shades, he took a hard right, opposite the direction of both his truck and the bank, and slipped the sunglasses on. He didn’t drop his pace until he was well past the windows of the diner.
Now what . . . ? It would be an hour before the bank doors were open. Will kept walking, toward the end of town, which meant a familiar park, and just beyond that, the Wahpekute River, the border between the “real world and home.”
He crossed the last street, and continued through a wrought iron arch. He followed a flagstone path that branched off in several directions. Unlike the vegetation of his property, the grass here was short. Though still matted from months of snow cover, it was almost solidly green. It would soon be standing straight and in need of a mowing. Will left the path and made for a cement bench just a few yards short of the riverbank.
Will was uneasy. He tried to focus on the band of brown water than moved past. The river was high, almost flush with the bank. On the opposite side, trees and brush stood rows deep in the water, the eddies and ripples around them were the only evidence the water was moving. The view had no calming effect. In his head, the question of his presence here was again begged. What there was for an answer followed, but he still couldn’t find any sense in it.
He was in the long past domain of his mother, but it was his father that had put him here, in the present. Will didn’t even know he owned the goddamn house until three days after the funeral. He heard it from the lawyer—his father’s lawyer—during the execution of the estate and the final disposition of the will. After the preamble and its declaration regarding the soundness of his father’s mind, there was a brief summary of the estate—“high six or low seven figures, depending what day it is…” he was told. He couldn’t ignore the low chuckle when the attorney added. “If he’d lived another year or two, we might well be talking high seven or low eight.” Will hadn’t shared the man’s amusement and killed it with a cold stare. The lawyer sobered, then said, “Your father spent a great deal of time in his final months focused on making this a seamless and simple process.” He paused a moment, as if waiting for a show of appreciation. After a moment, Will nodded, then let what came next flow past his ears as if he were a dog with its head sticking out a car window. The only concern he’d had was how his son was going to come out in this. As it turned out, a good deal of that time spent during those “final months” had been focused on Kurt. The young man had a good head on his shoulders, but no matter how even keeled a twenty-two-year-old might be, adding more than a handful of zeroes to his bank account could put him on the fast track to rehab, prison or a morgue. But, the old man was nothing if not controlling. He’d put enough stipulations on his grandson’s new money that the kid could cash in for a free PhD if he wanted one, but wouldn’t be able to party any harder than a sales clerk for the next eighteen years. As for the rest of it, Will didn’t give a shit. If he’d learned anything in his life, it was that having this kind of money bought nothing short of bondage. It owned you.
The attorney’s droning finally came to an end. Will allowed some life to come back into his expression. The final question he’d been asked was whether he was going to allow the people who’d been managing his father’s money to keep their jobs, or if he had plans to manage it by other means.
Will shrugged. “Leave it where it’s at,” he said. He sat up straighter in his chair and added, “For now, anyway.” He figured he’d need a few weeks to settle down before he decided whether to give it all away, buy an island, or reserve himself a seat on the first manned flight to Mars. Decisions, decisions…
“I’d support that as your best choice,” the attorney commended. Will’s agreement was a shrug. He sleepwalked his way through half a dozen signatures, then sat back and waited for a signal it was time for him to leave. He waited impatiently as the lawyer sent for a secretary to make copies. The first thing he was going to do was make his old man buy him a beer. The lawyer wasn’t through with him quite yet.
“There’s just one more thing,” he told Will. He put a large manila envelope on the desk. “I have some documentation here regarding the house.”
Will looked away from him. “I don’t want anything to do with his fucking house.”
“Oh no,” the attorney said, sounding a little confused. “His residence was sold months ago. Those proceeds were included in the estate.”
Will was forced to face back across the desk. He was more confused than the lawyer. He shook his head and shrugged. His father’s attorney pushed a manila envelope toward him. “Your grandparent’s house,” he said, as if it explained everything. It did not. Will looked down at the envelope, but didn’t touch it. “The only instructions I’d been given regarding this issue was that I remind you of it.”
Still looking at the envelope, Will said, “Remind me? I don’t get it.” It was all he could muster.
He heard the lawyer swallow, but it was almost a minute before he spoke: “It’s… yours. It has been, essentially, since your grandfather’s death.” There was a heavy pause. Will’s eyes darted around the room, he didn’t dare let them focus on any single object. From a thousand miles away, he heard, “You didn’t—”
“Son of a bitch,” he interrupted the distant voice. It felt like a shout, but it came out as a sharp hiss. He found a place to focus his vision, locking his gaze on the attorney. “No. I didn’t know. That son of a bitch never told me.” Will sank back in his chair. He realized he was breathing in way that was causing his entire body to shudder. “That son of a bitch,” he whispered through a ragged exhale. It took him a few minutes to get his breathing—and his brain—back under control. The lawyer sat in silence with a knuckle between his teeth.
Somewhat composed, Will stretched an arm. His hand hovered over the envelope. “It’s all in here?” he asked. The lawyer came back to attention. “All the property details, title, tax records, all of it? Everything?”
The lawyer nodded. “Yes–” He was about to say more, but Will waved the hand in his face and picked up the envelope. He turned without a word and made for the office door.
“Mr. Holliday,” he heard behind him, “the rest of your documents…”
“You’ve got my address,” Will said over his shoulder, and was out.
+ + +
Will was fourteen when his grandfather died. He had no reason to believe anything had been bequeathed to him. His grandmother had told him to take anything he wanted of his grandfather’s right after the funeral. Will had been so crushed by his passing that he couldn’t take anything as simple as even a watch or one of his service medals. The time he’d spent with her after that she’d never informed him that he was the actual owner of the farm. Why would she? It was only contingent upon her own death, after all, and Nan would never include as crass a subject as possessions or property when dying was the issue. Such a thing wasn’t discussed.
After leaving the lawyer’s office, Will had scoured the contents of his envelope. The will was simple.
We, Martin Oskar and Anna Willemina Rijsbergen, bequeath all assets, including all properties, monies and possessions without exception, to Willem Martin Holliday (grandson), immediately and forthwith upon contingency of our deaths or debilitation.
That was it. It was signed by both, dated over two years before his grandfather had actually died. His mother was gone almost three years after her father. There’d been no mention of her in the will, or in any of the paperwork included. Neither had there been any mention of his father, though his signatures were all over the documents associated with the execution of the will. All of this had been taken care of in Minneapolis. The witness’s signatures were there as well. It was not the attorney Will had met with, but it was the same firm. Will’s name was on the paperwork as well, just beside his father’s. He hadn’t contributed a drop of ink to the papers. There was an added document, stapled to the will and dated five days after his grandmother’s death. It was a bank statement.
The last bearer of the once affluent and influential, admired and envied Rijsbergen name ended its history in Limburg County with a little more than six thousand dollars in the bank. Over half of that amount was lost to funeral expenses. An antithesis of his father, had Anna Rijsbergen made it a year or two longer, she would have died flat broke.
What remained was added as a trust fund in Will’s name, collectible upon reaching his age of majority. That hadn’t happened, but there was a record of its addition as a drop in the bucket to the obscene volume of his father’s legacy, and not applied until the very day of his father’s own demise. There was no question this had been planned well in advance– years.
+ + +
Fucker. Will spat, attempting to add his own drop to the flow of the Wahpekute. His effort fell far short. Regardless of the complexity and distance of their relationship, Will could never claim the father did not know his son well. If Will had known of this at fourteen, he would have been insistent on preserving the place just as he’d always known it. He may even have been goofy enough in his pubescence to have insisted on living there. At eighteen, he’d have sold the place without a second thought. Not for the money, but as a means of deleting half of his past. The agonies of life with mom were still sutured fast in his gut. He was desperate to rid himself of it in any way he could. But now, with the years passed and the last tangible string of family history snapped, there was no way he could let the place go without having at least one final, long and hard look at it. His father knew this. Whatever agenda he had that directed his actions, his father had at last held a hoop he could force Will to jump through. Whatever intention lay behind it, Will knew it was neither sinister or spiteful, but it wasn’t gracious or benign, either. And all that would have mattered to his father was that it would work.
Thus, Will was sitting on a bench in Riverside Park, in Venlo, Limburg County, Minnesota. Both halves of his messy past were now fused together in one messy whole, despite his best and lifelong efforts to prevent it. Now he had to decide what kind of future he was supposed to make of it.
“Fucker,” he repeated, this time out loud. With that epithet firmly in mind, he suddenly thought of a person he could apply it to directly. He pulled out his phone and rang up the contractor. When the ringing stopped, he kept his ear to the phone long enough to be sure it was a live voice at the other end. “Hey! Will Holliday here,” he barked. He gave it an instant to sink in, and lingered a few seconds to allow the man to formulate some kind of excuse. As soon as he heard a voice again, he said, “You’re fired.” He hit “end call” with his thumb. He looked at the phone. He’d expected to gain some modicum of satisfaction from the call, but had not. He caught note of the time before the screen went black, surprised at how long he’d been sitting there. If he paced himself just right, he would be at the doors of the bank right when they opened.
addictive, waiting on more.