The Inheritance

The Inheritance

Vol. 1

Zelda Reed

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First Original Edition, September 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Zelda Reed

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent from the author.

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Thirteen

Fourteen

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The Inheritance

Vol. 1

My father dies on the Wednesday after all the schools in Baltimore City let out for the summer.

I’m cleaning out my classroom when I get the call, my cell phone ringing from my desk in the corner.
The
desk, I have to start calling it, because after I hand in my keys it will no longer be mine. Miranda,
Miss McKinley
, math teacher extraordinaire with the too-white teeth and bad wig is taking over my room. “Because it’s bigger, you know, and your air conditioning never breaks,
hahaha
. Look at me, I sound like such a bitch. I’m sorry, I just need your space.” There was no room for argument and not a hint of negotiation because Miranda’s fucking Principle Jones and I’m moving to the other side of the building.

I have three boxes filled with what my student’s call, white-girl-shit. My white girl picture frames from Pottery Barn, filled with photos of my white girl friends, and my white girl mother. My white girl mug spells out my white girl name in a beautiful typographical script:
Caitlin W.
My white girl stacks of neon folders rest atop my white girl books (The Bell Jar, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, and Mansfield Park) and my white girl post-its and my white girl pens, pencils, markers, and a framed copy of my college degree. I debate tossing it all out and starting anew in August, when I pick up the phone.

“I didn’t think you were gonna answer.” It’s my mom. She sounds exhausted but I know she’s just woken up. Last night was her late shift at The Diner.

“Why wouldn’t I have? I’m not doing anything important,” I toss a handful of ‘thank you cards’, handwritten by my students on lined notebook paper into a box.

“Because,” my mother says with a sigh. Her signature move, starting sentences she has no intention of finishing.

“What’s up?” I ask, nudging her to the point.

My mother’s the sort of woman who can sit on the phone for hours, knitting or snacking or watching television low in the background. She and her friends, other working women in their sixties with grey and white hair down their backs, call each other up all the time and say nothing but, “Hello,” “Hello,” before drifting into a comfortable silence.

“We got a call from Gina.”

“Gina who?”

“Gina Murano.”

I roll my eyes. Gina’s round face pops up in my mind without warning. Everything’s foggy except for her brown eyes, sharp and bright. When she was married to my father, her eyes were her defining feature. “Look at my brown eyed gal,” he used to say.
Gal
. Because he was perpetually stuck in the 1950s.

“What does she want?” I ask.

My mother sighs. “It’s your father. He’s dead.”

I stack one of the boxes atop the other. “How’d that happen?”

“Cancer, or something,” I can hear my mother waving her hands. “Or maybe it was a really violent cold, I can’t remember. He’s just dead and she wants you to attend the funeral.”

“Did you tell her I’m busy?”

“Of course not.”

“Why?”

“Because you aren’t.”

I glance around my –
the
– classroom. I’ve taken down posters, cleaned the chalkboard, lined up the desks, and filled my boxes with my white-girl-shit. There isn’t a trace of me left in the room, just a disturbing emptiness indicative of the long summer break.

“But what if I don’t want to go?”

“Then you can call her back and tell her so.”

A groan snakes its way out of my stomach. “Can’t you do it?”

My mother laughs. It’s light and airy and reminds me of when she was younger and angrier, always cursing my father’s name whenever anyone brought him up. She loved reminding the world of what a piece of shit he was for cheating, and walking out the door without so much as a glance back. Throughout the years her anger’s grown into exhaustion and then relief and finally forgiveness.

“Caitlin, you’re twenty-five. Call her yourself and don’t let her guilt you into changing your mind.”

“I don’t think she’ll be able to.”

My mother laughs again. “But she’ll try and you’ll think about caving in. Trust me. I know the both of you like the back of my hand.”

______

My mother was my father’s first wife, the only woman he married who was close to his age. She was greying in their wedding photos, the years of working on a Western Pennsylvanian farm showing in the light wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and brushed against the back of her hands. She was pretty. Not beautiful, striking, or gorgeous but a pretty woman who caught the eye of my average looking father, when he was working in New York and climbing his way up the financial ladder. But isn’t that how things always go? Poor man marries poor girl, he gets a promotion and they buy a house, he gets another and they have a kid, he gets a third and other women take notice, he gets a fourth and he starts fucking someone younger.

Divorce, remarry, rinse and repeat.

Gina came after my mom and lasted the move from New York to Chicago. She was prettier and wore her hair in big dark curls, her accent thick as molasses. She was from Long Island and there was no denying it. My father got rid of her when she started begging for kids and gaining weight.

Darlene was next and the prettiest of the bunch. Half-black with smooth brown skin, she wasn’t interested in getting along with me and I ignored her just as much. Where Gina was loud, Darlene was pensive and quiet, spending long afternoons reading in the living room before taking my father’s credit card and spending thousands on North Michigan Ave. My father refused to admit it but she left him, for a handsome model who couldn’t provide much money but gave her everything else.

When I call Gina she tells me my father was dating someone new.

“She’s twenty-two,” she says, hissing into the speaker. “And she’s a fucking idiot.” Even after all these years a portion of me wants to laugh and ask, how does it feel, but I bite my tongue as she rants. “Her name’s Ashleigh,” she pretends to gag. “A-s-h-l-e-i-g-h. Even the way she spells her name is stupid.”

I
must
come to the funeral to meet her, Gina says. I cannot leave her alone with
those
people. She doesn’t mean my father’s co-workers and friends, the men who are aging and in denial as they sweat through their expensive suits, avoiding the topic of their cold and dissatisfied wives for a lively conversation about their new receptionist. She means Ashleigh and Darlene. The other women who hate her as much as she hates them.

I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m not on her team either, not even in the same league as the other women or those men. It’s a problem I’ve had since childhood. As much as I hated my father and Gina and Darlene and the fat cats who roamed in and out of my father’s condo, I kept my feelings behind buttoned lips. I wasn’t a people-pleaser, I was a Julian-Wheeler-pleaser. If I listened to Gina, my father would love me, if I stayed out of Darlene’s way, my father would love me, if I impressed his friends, my father would love me.

But my father, I’ve come to realize, was incapable of love. He knew how to lust and holler and whistle at women, but to view me as anything other than a nuisance the courts ordered him to deal with, was far too much to ask.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Gina. “I’m not coming to the funeral.”

I can almost hear her pouting on the other end. “But what about the reading of his will?”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you want to know what he left you?”

“I already know. Nothing.”

Gina sighs. “You really don’t know anything about your father.”

I roll my eyes. “If that’s what you think.”

“I’ve got twenty bucks that says he left you something. And when you get that letter in the mail, from all the way in Baltimore, you’re gonna feel real bad for missing your father’s funeral. Cause he cared enough to leave you something real good and you didn’t care enough to pay your last respects.”

Gina, still dramatic as ever, hangs up before I can respond.

______

This is the point in the story where you come to hate me. Where you realize you’re dealing with someone who’s shamelessly self-serving and for that, I apologize.

I decide to go to my father’s funeral because I’m impatient. I want to know what he left me and I can’t wait for a letter to come in the mail while Gina taunts me, via phone, about the big reveal I missed. And if he doesn’t leave me anything (of which, I’m sure is the truth) I want to see Gina’s face as she realizes my father is the piece of shit I’ve always known him to be.

On the plane I sit next to a nervous soon-to-be college freshman with cheap square glasses and poorly cut hair. His name’s Dylan and he’s heading to Chicago three months early to get used to the city, before he starts art school in the fall.

“You’re gonna love it,” I tell him, in that overly enthusiastic way all adults speak to children stepping into a new era of their life. A hint of nostalgia in my voice as I faintly remember my own college years. Eight semesters at BU, suffering through the bitter Boston cold, sucking down bourbon every evening to get warm in the poorly heated dorms.

I dispel all the rumors he’s heard about the city. “The winters aren’t that bad,” I say, and, “You stay away from the South Side and you’ll be fine.” Occasionally the man in the aisle seat glances over, as if he wants to dispute me, but the pair of us refuse to acknowledge him. He will not burst our positive bubble.

Dylan allows me to wax poetic about the nightlife, the shopping, the eclectic enclaves sprinkled throughout the city, the long strip of beach where you can press your toes into Lake Michigan, the pizza, the hot dogs, the men (“I don’t know if you’re into that.”), the movie theaters, the off-Broadway shows, the atmosphere,
Chicago
.

If it wasn’t for my father, after college I would’ve moved to the city. But after too much time weaving in and out of bars in Logan Square and riding the El to the edge of the city, the toxic memories of my father refused to remain buried.

I’ll never forget: The summer between ninth and tenth grade, in the last year of my father’s marriage to Gina, she’d gone home to be with her dying mother. It was just my father and I, for three months, and he couldn’t resent me, my mother, and Gina enough for it. I mostly stayed to myself, binge watching television in “my room” (which my father called
her
room, as if he couldn’t believe he’d bought a space with a room specifically for me) in-between ordering pizza and roaming the city alone.

There were weekends when my father dragged me out the condo and to some overpriced restaurant, where I would sit among his friends and their wives, pretending not to understand their raunchy jokes.
Well Hannah’s geyser is a real squirter if you know what I mean. Haha. Oh come on honey, why you gotta hit me?

At one particular dinner a man joked about my father’s wives getting younger and younger. Everyone laughed and I forced a smile as to not seem too sullen or dense.

My father called me, “Cheryl’s kid.”

One of the other men said, “So you had nothing to do with it, huh?”

Another round of laughter, polite glances my way, and another forced smile.