Knowing me was Key

The Lobby

I stood in this dark, poorly lit parlor trying my hardest to remember some of my earliest memories with my mom, but I felt like a mental fog had descended on me these last 2 weeks and everything was harder to navigate. Strangely, I could only remember very early memories that included both my mom and dad despite them having been apart for most my life. The memories were of them being warm and kind to each other which if you had seen them sharing a table at my college graduation dinner you would have never believed. I quickly did the math on this bittersweet memory that seemed locked into the front of my mind like the slides of an old picture show in constant rotation around my fragile emotional state. Twenty-two years ago sounded like a terribly long time ago, but being 26 years old in this position I was in today felt like I was terribly too young to be dealing with the loss of my mother. I felt the prickly sharpness of tears fighting their way forward on the back of my eyeballs and that strange but familiar tightness in my throat that signified my mascara was 7 seconds away from creating a hot Crayola disaster down my face. I felt them, the tears, as they well up in the basin of my eyeballs and glossed over the surface of my eyes.

My aunt Jamie must have noticed from across the parlor room and she floated calmly on over to me, and away from the conversation she was having with my uncle Damian. There was always something between them that I could never place my finger on and I thought I had once accidentally over heard my mother talking loudly on the phone in our kitchen scolding my aunt Jamie for some kind of indiscretions she and my uncle Damian had exchanged at my 8th birthday party. I looked at her quickly and quietly mouthed the words

“I’m okay,” but her preoccupied stare let me know she was not in the business of believing me. Instead of trying to convince her that I was truly okay, or even on my way to eventually being okay with this day I defaulted to my usual dark and awkward humor, which I was told was my mothers’ addition to the complex pot of opposites I called my personality. My aunt Jamie cracked a little smile for me when I told her “ your eyes are the color of cheesecake”, which apparently I had told her when I was three and from there on out made its appearance on all her dating profiles and on every standardized form she could get away with writing in “cheesecake” under eyecolor.

My aunt Jamie was not really my aunt, she was my mothers’ longest and closest friend on this planet and I couldn’t remember a time where she wasn’t in my mother and my life. Sleepovers, vacations, graduations, holidays, you name it she was there and my father really hated her proximity to my mom because as my mom so hilariously put it, “he was one of those antiquated game of throne, blood in blood out loyalist types,” very roman catholic and “staunchy for a millennial.”

I was overcome with emotion suddenly while thinking of my moms’ casually offensive and accurate descriptions of my fathers hang-ups. My grievance counselor had warned me this would likely happen and the hard realization, that besides me, no one on this ghetto climate doomed planet was likely more heartbroken than my aunt Jamie; so I pulled her long tall elegant frame into mine on that dusty cold morning of March 11th 2047.

A nicely dressed woman with damn near perfect bone structure and a tight, neatly wrapped bun approached me in this dreary parlor first, before anyone, as though she somehow knew I was the most fragile amongst us. The woman touched my forearm cautiously and so gently while I was still pressed into my aunt, who in this moment was becoming more my mother by the minute, and said “when you’re ready miss Sumner-your party’s papers are ready.” She used her sharp facial structure to then look at everyone else in the room and nod in the direction of a large wooden double door marked “conference” in clean gold lettering.

The Conference Room

My aunt took a seat beside me and rested her hand on my skirt. I felt protected by her, despite my father’s large militant presence behind me. In the room there were 5 chairs positioned in a half crescent formation around a heavy dark oak desk. One by one my two uncles and my father sat in one of the three remaining chairs to complete the crescent moon. Behind the dark and heavy desk a large handsome woman stared stoically back at her audience of 5. The large womans’ desk had a few succulents and a large pointed amethyst quartz on the corner nearest my father, and out of the corner of my eye I could see him fixated on the crystal, and all I could think was that this woman behind the desk could not have been more my mothers’ brand of human. Tall like my aunt Jamie, with crystals and succulents, a real no nonsense kind of broad. It made me smile and strangely made me feel slightly better that even in her afterlife my mom was still somehow expressing her love for a good old fashion feminist, and even in her after life she was still showing me who she thought was cool if but for nothing to annoy my father. My father looked really annoyed.

The large woman behind the desk wasted no time, she began dividing my mothers’ assets out loud in a transactional callous manner and the fog that had once plauged me earlier in the day descended on me again. “To my oldest brother John-Charles I leave you $145,000.”

I saw the look of immense shock and immediate happiness wash over him. My uncle was far from a greedy man and I knew he love my mother dearly having once walked her down the aisle, yet the look of satisfaction was unsettling. “To my puppy, I also leave you $145,000.” My uncle Damien began to cry at the mention of his childhood nickname and he unlike John Charles did not look even the slightest bit happy, not even at the amount that was being left to him. After wiping his tears and face with a tissue that the woman large behind desk offered him without looking up, a bit of relief somewhat clung to his face but his eyes stayed sad.

“To Mathis G. Sumner l leave you $70 US dollars, the price of one marriage certificate in the year 2020.” The room was quiet and if you could somehow imagine draining the blood out of an entire room that’s what it felt like to sit there with my fathers’ news. When my father was upset a steely disassociated look would cross his face and eyes and a deep heated redness would traveled from the rim of his neck tie and up to his square sharp face. The large woman behind the desk had the slightest curl in her lip, that wasn’t there before and although she wasn’t quite smiling at all, I felt like she wanted to. “Relax Mathis,” the woman read with no inflection and no particular tone. “Do you honestly think that I would leave you only $70?” The large woman from behind the desk did not look up once from her file or even pause to take a break from the awkward tension happening around her, but most definitely not inside her or her booming voice.

It took the whole room about 20 painful seconds to realize that this was my mothers’ writing, my mothers voice, being authored through this large woman behind the desk. “Mathis Sumner I leave you my house, the home where I raise our daughter. Enclosed on the deed I will leave a codiciled will for the next of kin, our daughter, as executor. Additionally I leave you $100,000 and the title to the JetSki’s I stole from you in our divorce.”

I burst into laughter, a deep and painful laughter, a laughter that momentarily felt like insanity as my chuckles turned to sobs………

The 3 Black books

The fog from earlier was heavy on my body as I realized the entire room was staring at my outburst with frightened austonishment. Even the woman from behind the desk had gotten up from her chair to meet me by my side, while the three men who were not my strangers, sat in disbelief, paralyzed by my slaughtering emotional out pour, with not a gesture of comfort coming my way, not a shred of softness to aid my cries. I gathered myself and wiped my face aggressively, accepting that the mascara was nothing but street art on my face. The woman from behind the desk straightened her posture angrily, but kept herself positioned between the 3 men and my aunt and I to let them almost primitively feel that they where in her house and I was under her protection. Quickly she grabbed three leather bound journals and shoved one in each of my uncle and my fathers’ hands’. They looked at her as though they’d never seen a journal before and she snapped at them to open the books to the first page. “Go on now read the inscription and here is where you’ll sign for acceptance of this executed will and testament.”

My father was the first to open the book, as though he couldn’t have gotten to the formalities portion of today any quicker. The heat of his dissociative rage made its appearance from his neck to his face again. My uncles stared blankly at the words on the pages and then dumbfounded back at one another, then to me. My father threw his black book down to the floor and yelled, “what kind of stupid bitch game shit is this Andrea.” It was the first time in a long time I heard him call my mother her name and not, “your mother.” The men looked shocked and with every passing second they looked either angry or confused. I wanted to know what words my mother wrote could have caused this male hysteria, but before I mustered the courage to ask the large woman from behind the desk addressed Jamie and I, turning her back to the men with an explanation. “They are to fill each of these books with writings of you Maureen, taking you out, getting to know you , understanding your life and return the book to you as proper signature for their inheritance.” I was so confused that the fog from the day was now just a dense tank of water. I didn’t understand what this sick game meant, was my father right was my mother just playing games? the chaotic energy of the room and my grief met and I began to sob uncontrollably again.

The key

“You are the key to their inheritance my dear. Once you, and you alone, are satisfied with their level of knowing you, your life thus far, what your dreams may come to, and how you want to be known by the only family you have left and the stories fill these pages will they receive any rights over their promised monies. Only when you give the word that they know you, can the key do its unlocking.” The large woman for the first time since meeting was soft and nurturing in tone. My aunt Jamie removed her phone from her pocket held it over the large woman’s’ card receiver on her desk and electronically sent her 20,000 dollars for her services while whisking me out of the double doors away from the hysteria of these men.