The afternoon of my husband’s funeral, I walked in to find his sister packing his clothes into suitcases with her family. “Everything here goes back to his real family, not you,” she said. Then I laughed so hard all three of them went still, because eleven days before his heart gave out, Butch had signed something.
Everything Butch and I had after twenty-six years was in that apartment in Duluth, and the service had wrung every last thing out of me.
I’d taken my heels off in the car.
I climbed to the third floor with them hooked on two fingers, keys in my other fist, wanting nothing but the couch and a locked door.
The door was standing open.
Gwendolyn was in the middle of the front room, pointing at things the way she pointed at waitresses every Thanksgiving.
Two suitcases stood at her feet.
They were OURS, the brown pair Butch and I bought for one trip to Branson and never used again.
The coat closet behind her was open.
Her husband, Masao, stood next to it with my mother’s old flowered duffel in his fist, zipped and bulging.
Their son’s wife was over by the window at Butch’s dresser, pulling his flannel shirts out of the bottom drawer by the armful.
On the side table next to the door somebody had laid out our bank envelopes, his truck keys, a yellow legal pad.
The list on the pad was in Gwendolyn’s tall printing.
TRUCK. WATCH. COINS. FILES.
“Oh good, you’re back,” Gwendolyn said.
She didn’t even straighten up from the suitcases.
“Everything here goes back to his real family, not you,” she said. “There’s a motel out by the highway, and Masao can carry a bag down for you.”
Masao gave me the smile he uses on bank tellers.
“Let’s keep this civil, Ingrid,” he said. “Nobody needs a scene today of all days.”
I looked down at the side table.
Butch had been on the bottom shelf since Thursday, in the white jar the funeral home gave me, right under the lilies from church.
Somebody had shoved the vase over to make room for the envelopes.
They’d walked past HIM four or five times to get at the closet.
“How’d you even get in?” I said.
Gwendolyn dangled a brass key on a pink plastic coil.
“I’m his sister,” she said. “That key’s been mine since I helped him haul that couch up the stairs in 2009.”
Their son’s wife dropped another stack of flannel on the carpet.
“Put his shirts back,” I said.
She looked at Gwendolyn instead of me.
“Back where?” Gwendolyn said. “He was my brother sixty-four years, honey, and you had him for twenty-six, so you do the math.”
That’s when I laughed.
Six nights before, in the hospice bed, Butch had hung onto my wrist and made me listen to him.
“If Gwen comes with suitcases, you laugh at her,” he said. “Phan has the rest.”
He made me say it back to him twice.
So I stood in my own doorway in that black dress with my shoes hooked on my fingers, and I laughed so hard I had to lean on the frame.
Masao set the duffel down.
Their son’s wife stopped with her arms full of shirts.
Gwendolyn’s mouth went flat.
“Are you having some kind of breakdown?” she said.
“No,” I said.
I wiped my face on the back of my wrist.
“He drove the same truck for fifteen years, so you all decided he was broke,” I said. “He never talked about money, so you decided he never planned for anything.”
“Twenty-six years I sat at your table, and I never heard one of you ask that man a real question.”
Masao folded his arms.
“He didn’t leave a will,” he said. “We went through the whole desk while you were at the church.”
Their pew had been empty all morning.
I’d told people they were stuck in traffic on the bridge.
“Sure you went through it,” I said. “He counted on that.”
My phone went off in my hand, a text from Phan.
Downstairs. Two minutes.
Gwendolyn was still holding up that key like it settled something.
Masao looked over at the desk with its drawers hanging open.
“You never knew him, Gwen,” I said. “Not a single thing about him.”
“And NOT ONE OF YOU has the faintest clue what Butch put his name to eleven days before the end.”
Somebody knocked before she could answer.
Three hard knocks.
I turned around and pulled it open.
Phan stood in the hall in her gray raincoat, with a county deputy on one side of her and Mr. Ledesma from the management office on the other, the one who comes up when our heat quits.
She had a blue accordion file under her arm.
Gwendolyn’s whole name was typed across the tab, the middle name she hates and all.
Gwendolyn read it from across the room.
Her mouth opened.
In twenty-six years I had never once seen that woman without her next sentence ready.
Three-fifteen
Phan walked past me and set the file down on the side table, right on top of Gwendolyn’s legal pad.
I dropped my heels on the carpet and pushed the lilies back over the jar where they belonged.
“Sit if you want to, Ingrid,” Phan said. “The first part’s short.”
She pulled out a stapled packet and held it up so the whole room could see the top page.
THE BUTCH AND INGRID ANDERSEN REVOCABLE TRUST.
At the bottom of the last page was his signature, the B big and leaning over the way he signed for packages. Under it was the date, just eleven days ahead of his last breath. Two witnesses had signed. A notary had stamped it.
“Everything in this apartment went into the trust,” Phan said. “The truck, the watch, the coins, every file in that desk. Ingrid is the trustee. None of it goes through probate.”
“He was on morphine,” Gwendolyn said.
“He was on Tylenol that week,” Phan said. “His doctor wrote a letter saying he knew exactly what he was signing. That’s in here too.”
The deputy stayed out in the hall with his thumbs hooked in his belt.
Mr. Ledesma stayed out there with him, holding his maintenance clipboard against his chest like a shield.
“Butch asked me back in September to call his lawyer if his sister’s green Buick showed up in visitor parking during the funeral,” he said to me. “It showed up at ten-fifteen.”
“That’s our car,” Masao said.
“I know whose car it is,” Mr. Ledesma said.
Phan didn’t put the trust back in the file. She laid it flat and kept her hand on the thick section behind it, the part with the tab.
“The trust isn’t why her name’s on this,” she said.
The couch
The couch was in the room with us. It’s brown corduroy with a burn on the left arm from Butch’s dad’s pipe, and it came out of the basement of the house on Arrowhead Road where Butch and Gwendolyn grew up.
Gwendolyn and Masao had lived in that house since their mother died in 1996.
In August of 2009 Gwendolyn decided the basement needed clearing out, and Butch said we’d take the couch. She drove it over in Masao’s work van and the two of them carried it up three flights while I held the doors.
Masao didn’t help. His back was bad that summer.
His flooring business had gone under in the spring, and nobody at Thanksgiving was allowed to mention it.
When the couch was in, the three of us sat at our kitchen table and I poured lemonade. Butch got the big checkbook out of the desk, the one with three checks to a page, and he wrote one out and tore it off slow.
Gwendolyn cried. In twenty-six years that was the only time I ever saw her do it.
Then Butch slid a sheet of paper across the table to her.
“Sign this too, Gwen,” he said. “If it’s a loan, you get to keep your pride.”
She laughed and signed it. I was busy getting ice, and I never saw what the paper said.
On the way over she’d had a key cut at the hardware store on Central, and the pink coil was the only color they had left. She put it on the counter by the lemonade.
“So I can check on you two,” she said.
Butch told her to keep it.
That’s the Gwendolyn the rest of Duluth knows. She carves the turkey at Arrowhead Road every year and says grace, and she says family is whoever shows up. My parents were gone by the time I married Butch. For twenty-six Thanksgivings her table was the only family table I had.
I’d figured the check was for a few thousand dollars.
We went to Branson that next spring because Butch said we couldn’t swing anywhere farther that year.
Now Gwendolyn sat down on that couch, right next to the burn on the arm, like she still owned half of it.
So what had Butch really bought with that check?
Tuesday
“I’m calling my own lawyer,” Gwendolyn said. “And don’t you tell me I didn’t sit with him. I sat with that man more than you know.”
“Tuesday she sat with him three hours,” Masao said.
I remembered that Tuesday.
I’d gone down to the hospice cafeteria for two coffees. When I came back Gwendolyn was in the chair by the bed with a folder on her knees and a pen in her hand. Butch was turned toward the wall with his eyes shut.
“He’s tired,” she said, and she put the folder in her purse. “I’ll come back.”
She came back on Friday. The nurse told her no visitors, Butch’s orders. I thought he just didn’t want her to see him that thin.
Their son’s wife had started folding the flannel shirts into the Branson suitcase while we talked. She folded them neat, the arms tucked in behind, the way you’d pack for somebody who was going on a trip.
I went to the door.
“I want them out,” I said to the deputy. “Today. Now.”
He was a young guy with his hat under his arm, and he looked like he’d rather be shoveling a driveway.
“Is your name on the lease, ma’am?” he said.
I looked at Mr. Ledesma.
He flipped two pages on his clipboard, and then a third.
“It’s just Butch,” he said. “It was always just Butch. He did all the renewals himself.”
I had signed every check for that rent for twenty-six years. It had never come up.
“Well, there you go,” Gwendolyn said from the couch. “She’s got no more right to be standing here than I do.”
“The leaseholder gave her a key,” the deputy said to me. “I’ll stay and keep the peace. But this is civil, and nobody’s leaving here today in cuffs.”
Gwendolyn crossed her legs.
“Keep packing, honey,” she said to her son’s wife. “He’s just here to watch.”
4417 Arrowhead Road
Phan untied the string on the accordion file and pulled out the thick section with the tab.
“August fourteenth, 2009,” she said. “A promissory note for one hundred twelve thousand dollars, signed by Gwendolyn and Masao. And a mortgage against 4417 Arrowhead Road, recorded with St. Louis County that same week.”
The bank had been about to take the house that summer. Butch paid them off. Then he became the bank.
One hundred twelve thousand dollars.
That was every dime we had saved in seventeen years, and I’d poured lemonade while he wrote it out.
Phan turned the next page toward me. It was a ledger in Butch’s square printing, one line a month. $400 in September 2009. $400 in October. It went on like that into 2011.
After March of 2011 there was nothing on the page except the dates.
He’d kept writing the dates. Fifteen years of them, every month, all the way down to this September, with a blank space beside each one.
“He forgave that,” Gwendolyn said. “He told us at Christmas to forget about it.”
“Which Christmas?” Phan said.
“Years ago.”
“Forgiving a recorded mortgage takes a recorded satisfaction,” Phan said. “He’d have had to sign one and file it. He never did.”
She laid down the last page. It was an assignment, dated the very day he signed the trust, with the same notary stamp.
The note and the mortgage on Arrowhead Road now belonged to the trust.
And the trust was me.
Masao sat down on the arm of the couch, on the burn.
“Ingrid,” he said. “Let’s talk about this like adults.”
I looked down at the legal pad, sticking out from under Phan’s file.
TRUCK. WATCH. COINS. FILES.
The duffel was still on the carpet where he’d set it down. It was bulging, and the closet past it still held coats nobody had touched.
“What’s in my mother’s bag, Masao?” I said.
Sign here, B.
“Shirts,” Masao said.
“The shirts are in the suitcase,” I said.
The deputy came one step into the room.
“Is that bag yours, ma’am?”
“It was my mother’s,” I said. “Now it’s mine.”
He looked at Masao, and Masao looked at Gwendolyn, and Gwendolyn looked at the window.
Masao bent down and unzipped it.
There wasn’t a stitch of clothing in it. It was the desk. Butch’s hanging folders were jammed in on their sides, the tax years, the truck title, the insurance, and the old checkbook with three checks to a page. On top was a folder with ARROWHEAD in Butch’s printing on the tab. It was empty except for a coupon book with fifteen years of coupons still in it.
Under the folder was one loose sheet.
SATISFACTION OF MORTGAGE. It was a St. Louis County form, typed out clean, with the house number and the recording date filled in from 2009. The signature line over Butch’s typed name was blank.
A yellow sticky note was stuck right beside it, in that tall printing.
Sign here, B.
The corner of the sheet had a brown ring on it, half a circle, from a coffee cup set down on a hospice tray.
Phan read it upside down.
“So you came for the original note,” she said to Gwendolyn. “Without the note and with this signed, you’d have had a clean title.”
Gwendolyn stood up.
“He was going to sign it,” she said. “He just needed some time to think.”
“He had eleven days,” I said.
“The original’s in my safe,” Phan said. “He brought it to my office in a shoebox in September. He left the copies in the desk on purpose.”
I picked the form up off the duffel and held it so Gwendolyn could see I’d seen the ring.
“That’s from Tuesday,” I said.
The bottom shelf
“You’d put a sixty-nine-year-old woman out of her own mother’s house,” Gwendolyn said. “On the same day you buried my brother.”
“Gwen,” Masao said.
“No. Let her look at me while she says it.” She came across the room, and she stepped right past the jar again to get at me. “I took care of Mom in that house nine years. Nine years of bedpans. Where was Butch? Up here in this apartment with you. That house is MINE. He knew it was mine.”
“Then why’d you need him to sign?” I said.
She didn’t answer that one.
“I’ll tell every person at St. Ben’s what you are,” she said. “I’ll tell them you poisoned him against his own blood. Don’t you think they won’t believe me. They’ve known me sixty years, and they’ve known you as the girl Butch brought home.”
Their son’s wife had stopped folding.
She knelt down at the suitcase and began taking the flannel shirts back out, one at a time, and putting them in the bottom drawer where they’d come from.
“What are you doing?” Gwendolyn said to her. “Leave those.”
She kept putting them back. When the drawer was full she shut it, and then she went out and stood in the hall next to Mr. Ledesma with her car keys in her hand.
“We had a buyer,” Masao said.
Gwendolyn turned around on him.
“A couple from the Cities,” he said. He wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to the carpet. “Three hundred forty. The realtor’s sign goes up a week from Monday. The title company found Butch’s mortgage in August, and Gwen said she’d have it signed off before he passed.” He rubbed his face. “I told you in the car he’d have the original. I told you, Gwen.”
“Shut up, Masao.”
“I told you.”
Phan looked at me. She didn’t say anything. Butch must have told her this part would be mine.
I’d been married twenty-six years to a man who wrote down a date every month for fifteen years beside an empty space and never said one word about it at her table.
“Call the note,” I said.
“Ninety days,” Phan said. “That’s what’s in the paper.”
“Ninety days,” I said.
“You’ll get your money out of my sale,” Gwendolyn said. “Every dime of it. And then you’ll never set foot on Arrowhead Road again as long as you live.”
“I know,” I said.
I held my hand out.
She didn’t move. Masao took the brass key off her finger himself, coil and all, and put it in my palm. Then he picked up my mother’s duffel, set it down empty on the couch, and walked out past the deputy without looking at either of us.
Gwendolyn stopped at the side table.
She looked down at the bottom shelf, at the white jar under the lilies, for a long time.
“He was my brother,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
The deputy wrote something down. Mr. Ledesma held the stairwell door open for her, and she went down.
The fourth Thursday
On Thanksgiving I climbed to the third floor in my snow boots, one grocery bag in my arm, my door key ready in my fist.
The door was locked. I’d had Mr. Ledesma change the cylinder the Monday after, and he wouldn’t let me pay him for it.
Inside, the lilies were long gone. Butch was on top of the dresser now, by the window, in the white jar with a folded blue flannel shirt underneath it.
A turkey breast is plenty for one person. I’d never cooked one before, because there was always the big bird at Arrowhead Road.
The realtor’s sign had gone up out there on schedule. Phan told me the couple from the Cities was still buying, and the payoff letter to the title company had gone out with Butch’s name and mine on it. One hundred twelve thousand dollars, and fifteen years of interest he never once asked for.
Nobody from St. Ben’s had called me since the funeral.
Their son’s wife sent me one text the week before. It was a photo of Butch at twelve years old, sitting on the front steps at Arrowhead Road with a fishing pole. She didn’t write anything with it.
I set the bag on the counter and opened the kitchen drawer for the carving knife.
The pink plastic coil was in there by the batteries, empty. I’d taken Gwendolyn’s key off it and thrown the key in the river from the bridge.
I picked up his truck keys off the counter and twisted them onto the coil.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who’s still holding onto a key they were handed a long time ago.
Family betrayal can take some truly audacious turns – especially when someone thinks they can claim what isn’t theirs, as in the story of a brother who took Mom’s house and ring. For more jaw-dropping family and marriage drama, read about a husband selling a multimillion-dollar business and a sister calling the doorman on her brother’s wife.
