For about seven seconds I heard my own family laugh at me in a room where a man was being paid three hundred dollars an hour to read my mother’s last words, and I understood that the joke wasn’t new — it was the house style, and it had been running since I was nine. Then the lawyer stopped, cleared his throat, and apologized, and it was the apology that gave it away. He’d read the document that morning. He knew what was on the list. He looked at the dish on my lap the way you look at a loaded thing, and he said, “Let’s begin,” and my uncle set it down on the table between us without being asked twice.
Item one was the house, to me. Item two was the dish. Not a Pyrex — a lidded stoneware casserole my grandmother brought from Warsaw in 1949, appraised in 2019 at eleven thousand dollars, which my mother had kept in the cupboard under the sink and used for scalloped potatoes because she thought a thing that survived that should be allowed to have a life. Item two also said that in 2011 my uncle had borrowed against my grandmother’s estate and never repaid it, and that the amount was being deducted from his share, and that my mother had documented all of it. The lawyer read that part in exactly the voice he’d read the rest. My aunt said “oh, don’t” once and then stopped. Nobody laughed. My cousin had already put the phone down.
I have the house and the dish and a folder of my mother’s handwriting explaining precisely what she thought of every person in that room, which she’d left as an attachment, which she was under no obligation to do. I don’t speak to my uncle. I speak to my aunt occasionally, badly. What I keep coming back to is that my mother knew the joke was coming — she’d lived in that family sixty-one years, she knew exactly what they’d say when I walked in carrying it — and she made me carry it in anyway, and then she made them hand it back. I make scalloped potatoes in it at Christmas. Just for me. It goes in the cupboard under the sink.
