…Grandma’s lake cottage was never supposed to belong to Grandpa Walt.”
My grandson, Noah, had found the locket in his mother’s jewelry box a month earlier. He recognized it from my wedding photo on my fridge. He’d hidden it at the bottom of the cake box I’d brought, hoping I’d find it when I got home. His mother caught it first.
I drove to my son’s house the next morning. My daughter-in-law, Kristen, wouldn’t open the door. My son, Mike, did. I asked him to bring me the locket. He did, looking confused. He didn’t know anything.
I opened it at the kitchen table.
Inside, behind a tiny photograph of my grandmother, was a folded slip of paper. It was a handwritten note, signed and witnessed: my grandmother’s last wish, leaving her lake cottage to me. She’d given me the locket on my wedding morning and told me, “Open it when you need it.”
I lost it at the reception that night. I never knew what was inside. When my grandmother died a year later, the cottage went to my uncle under her old will. He sold it to a family friend named Walt Turner.
Walt Turner was Kristen’s grandfather.
Kristen’s mother had been a waitress at my wedding. She picked up the locket from the dance floor and kept it. Years later, she opened it, realized what it was and hid it, because her father had bought the cottage with that note “lost.” Kristen inherited the cottage, and the locket, when her mother died. She knew exactly what it meant.
A lawyer told me the document might no longer be enforceable after forty-one years. But Mike didn’t need a lawyer to understand. He’d watched his wife throw away his mother’s cake and pocket the proof that her family’s lake house had been taken from me.
Kristen offered to “share” the cottage on weekends. Mike told her that wasn’t good enough. She eventually agreed to sell it to me at the price her grandfather had paid in 1986.
I spend summers there now. Noah comes every July. The locket hangs on a hook by the door. I made him a chocolate cake for his fourteenth birthday. Nobody threw it away.
