Chapter 2 - The Pedigree of a Grudge
Our father, Arthur Bennett, had been a county surveyor for thirty-one years.
He was a man who understood boundaries not as legal abstractions, but as three-quarter-inch iron pipes driven four feet into the red clay beneath the roots of the loblolly pines. He carried an old transit made of blackened brass in a mahogany box with leather straps, and every Saturday morning when I was nine, he would take me out to the section lines along the Neuse River to teach me how to read the vernier scale.
"A line is either straight or it isn't, Cat," he would say, his thumb resting on the leveling screw. "You don't bend the chain to make the neighbor feel better about his fence. You find the pin. You clear the briars off the stone. And then you write down the bearing in the book. If the deed says North eighty-nine degrees East, you don't call it ninety just because the man's wife brought you a glass of iced tea."
Shayla never went to the section lines.
Shayla had what my mother called "the delicate constitution." If she sat in the sun for twenty minutes behind the school in Knightdale, her skin broke out in small pink hives that required calamine lotion and an afternoon on the horsehair sofa with the curtains drawn and three ginger ales from the glass-door cooler at the Texaco.
When Arthur died in the winter of twenty-twenty, he did not leave a complicated will. He left forty-two pages of hand-drawn field books, twelve pairs of iron-toed boots that smelled of creek mud, and a four-bedroom brick ranch on an acre of land off Old Mill Road that he had built himself with five-inch tongue-and-groove pine and a mortgage from the State Employees' Credit Union that was paid to the penny seventeen years before the stroke took him.
He left the house to Diane for her natural life.
Upon her death, the instrument directed, the property was to be appraised by an independent member of the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers and divided equally between his two daughters: share and share alike, per stirpes, without preference or offset.
The day after the funeral, while the ham platters from the ladies' auxiliary were still sitting on the Formica counter in the kitchen, Shayla sat in our father's green vinyl recliner—the one he had sat in every evening since nineteen-seventy-eight with his stocking feet on the footstool—and kicked the lever until the springs popped.
"We need to get this carpet up," she said.
Her eyes were red, but she was holding a yellow legal pad on her knee with an estimate from an interior decorator in North Raleigh who specialized in "modern farmhouse" transitions.
"The shag holds the tobacco smell," she said. "Ryan says if we paint the brick white and put down that gray vinyl plank from the lumber yard, we can get thirty-five hundred a month on the short-term rental market before the state fair starts."
I was thirty-two then. I had my second-year associate's pin from the firm in my lapel, and my hands were still gray from handling the carbon paper on Dad's probate filings.
"Mom is living here, Shayla," I told her.
"Mom can move into the garden apartment behind Ryan's brother's shop," she replied, without looking up from her legal pad. "It's all on one level. She doesn't need three bedrooms to watch the news in."
Mom had come through the swinging door from the pantry then, carrying a plastic bowl of potato salad with a piece of tinfoil tucked over the edge.
She did not look at the green recliner. She did not look at Dad's boots sitting by the umbrella stand.
She walked directly to Shayla, set the bowl on the yellow pad, and smoothed my sister's hair back from her temple with both hands—that same rhythmic, hypnotic stroke she had used when Shayla failed her tenth-grade algebra exam and spent three days in bed eating saltines.
"Your sister is just practical, Catherine," Mom said, her eyes drifting toward the window where the azaleas were dying back from the frost. "She thinks about the future. You've always had that rigid way about you. Just like your father. Everything has to be by the book with you."
"The deed is the book, Mom," I said.
"Well," Mom sighed, her voice falling into that soft, southern cadence that sounds like sweet tea until you realize there is battery acid at the bottom of the glass. "Deeds don't keep the pipes from freezing, do they?"
That was the winter the money began to leak.
It did not disappear in great, dramatic chunks that would have triggered an audit from the clerk of court. It went in five-hundred-dollar increments through the automated teller machine at the State Employees' Credit Union branch across from the high school.
Withdrawal: $500.00 — ATM #042 — Raleigh, NC.
Withdrawal: $500.00 — ATM #042 — Raleigh, NC.
Withdrawal: $400.00 — POS Debit — HomeGoods #112.
Withdrawal: $650.00 — POS Debit — The Lash Lounge — Cary, NC.
When I asked to see the bank statements in March of twenty-twenty-one, Mom told me she had misplaced the password for the online portal.
"Shayla takes care of the bills now, Catherine," she said, her fingers busy with the fringe on her knitted shawl. "She has the app on her phone. It's so much simpler than going down to the branch with those paper books. You're so busy with the firm. We didn't want to burden you."
"Is she paying the insurance?" I asked.
"Of course she's paying the insurance."
"Because the county tax records show the hazard policy on Old Mill Road has a cancellation warning attached for non-payment of the windstorm endorsement."
Mom's mouth had tightened then—that thin, purple line that meant she was about to cite my grandfather's service in the Navy or the fact that I had not called her on the Sunday before last.
"Your sister has three children to feed, Catherine," she said.
"Shayla has one child, Mom," I said. "Brooklyn is six."
"Ryan's boys count," she snapped. "They're with them every other weekend. They need shoes just like anybody else."
Ryan's boys were nineteen and twenty-one. One of them was currently serving eighteen months in a correctional facility outside Morganton for joyriding in an unregistered flatbed, and the other worked thirty hours a week at a vape store in Garner and lived in the converted utility room behind Ryan's garage with three pit-bull crosses he bred for cash.
I did not press the tax records then.
May you like
That was the first time I compromised the line. I told myself it was three hundred dollars; I told myself my father had been dead six months and my mother was seventy-one and if she wanted to spend her widow's mite on French tips and fake-wood siding, that was her business until the estate closed.
I did not know that while I was drafting summary judgment motions on wrongful termination cases on the eighth floor of the Wachovia building downtown, my sister was sitting at our mother's mahogany dining table with a bottle of white wine and a black gel pen, practicing Arthur Bennett's signature on a home equity conversion application from an online lender in Scottsdale, Arizona.
