Page 150 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

“No, dear, I’m fine.”
I bent over to kiss her cheek. She smelled like vanilla. “You are my favorite person,” I told her. It wasn’t true, but I said it because I loved her. I said it, too, because nobody else had bothered to stay with her after her husband of sixty-three years had been put in the ground.
“Good,” she replied. “I should be.”
And then I left her alone in that large, quiet, empty house.
Two weeks after my grandfather’s funeral, I was home when a DHL truck pulled up and delivered a yellow envelope containing a copy of my grandfather’s will. I read through it twice to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood anything. I had promised my brother I’d call him as soon as I knew anything, but I was reluctant to do so. Fritz and Lisa’s third child, William, had been born hours after my grandfather’s funeral. Twenty-four hours after that, he’d begun having seizures. He had been in the neonatal intensive care unit ever since. They had two young children at home, and Fritz had to work. I had no idea how they were managing all of it.
I hated to be the bearer of more bad news, but he needed to know. I called him.
“So what’s the deal?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I told him. “We got nothing,”
A few days later, I got a call from Rob. As far as I could remember, he had only ever called me before to let me know when Gam was in the hospital. He acted as if everything were fine. If I signed off on the will, he implied, everything would be great. And he did need my signature in order for the will to be released for probate. Though it’s true that my grandfather disinherited me and my brother—that is, instead of splitting what would have been my father’s 20 percent share of his estate between me and my brother, he had divided it evenly among his four other children—we were included in a bequest made separately to all of the grandchildren, an amount that proved to be less than a tenth of 1 percent of what my aunts and uncles had inherited. In the context of the entire estate it was a very small amount of money, and it must have infuriated Robert that it gave me and Fritz the power to hold up the distribution of the assets.
Days passed, and I couldn’t bring myself to sign. In the breadth and concision of its cruelty, the will was a stunning document that very much