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The Will to Give

and the pressure to make a calculated move

By Julia ForresterPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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photo by Ketut Subiyanto

Tessa saw her sister before her sister saw her. The red Accord, passed down from their older cousin, usually stood out as the only car from its era still on the road. Watching Corrine cross the parking lot toward the diner, Tessa straightened up her table. Angled the laptop screen as if she hadn’t been slouching. Piled all the used napkins onto her crumb-covered plate and pushed it to the edge of the table. Closed her black notebook and snapped the elastic around it, arranging it parallel to the computer.

She was just stowing her pen away in her bag, hiding its badly-chewed cap, as Corrine plopped herself opposite in the booth. “Sorry,” she said, taking off the name tag that was still pinned to her shirt. “Andrea was late, which then, made me late. Big surprise.” She reached for the menu standing up between the salt and pepper shakers by the window.

“No problem,” Tessa said, smiling thankfully at the server who came by to collect her napkin-plate.

“So, how’s this all going?” Corrine replaced the menu and turned back to her sister. “You said you were having a hard time with it?”

“It just...” Tessa hesitated, unsure how to phrase the problem. “It’s not going as far as I thought it would.”

Corrine looked suddenly concerned. “You still have it, right? That’s a lot of money to spend in a few days.”

“I haven’t spent any of it!” Tessa insisted, bringing her voice down to a whisper as the server returned with a fresh mug for Corinne and refilled Tessa’s coffee. Tessa waited for her to take Corrine’s order and step fully away before continuing. “I can’t! I know it’s a lot of money. More than I’ve ever had. But it’s just... not going to do what I need it to do. What she wanted it to do.”

Corrine looked at her sister over the rim of her mug as she sipped. “What do you mean, what she wanted it to do? There weren’t any stipulations in the will, were there?” Tessa had already told her sister, in detail, about the meeting with Mrs. McPhearson’s lawyer. About the $20,000 transfer. About the letter, a chipper note from beyond the grave written in the hand of a neighbour who, days ago, she would have said she barely knew. Its cream-coloured edge was staring up at her from right there on the table, tucked into the back cover of her notebook.

Every detail of it, even two days later, was still hovering immediately at the forefront of Tessa’s mind as if trying to insist that, yes, this was what had happened. As if she could have left a single one of them out when relaying the story.

“There weren’t “stipulations” specifically,” she said, with a tone that sounded like an eye roll. “But the whole point of the thing was right there in the letter. “Because I have the general impression that you are a good person, with the ability to turn a sum of money into good things.” That’s a pretty clear directive, if you asked me.”

“Don’t you think if she had some special plans for twenty grand, she would have, like, talked to you about it before?” Corrine thanked the server who brought over her breakfast special, and started in on the sausages right away. “I think this lady just liked you. Thought you were nice, or whatever, and so you deserved something for that.” She continued even as she chewed. “You don’t have to turn this into one of your pressure-cooker situations. You’re overthinking it.”

This time, Tessa actually did roll her eyes. “Her literal dying words were that I could turn it into good things. And I’m trying, but honestly, good things cost a lot more than I ever realized, now that I’m one of those people who might actually be able to do them. Look at this.”

She turned her laptop to face the two of them and scrubbed her fingers around the trackpad. When the screen lit up, it was open on one of about a dozen tabs, each one talking up a certain fundraiser, charitable effort, or plea for help. This one was mostly taken up by a picture of a speckled grey dog curled up in a recliner.

“This is Meeko,” she explained, scrolling down the page where Meeko’s family had written a comprehensive explanation of his recent health troubles. “He started throwing up one day, and within a week, he was having emergency gastric surgery and the bills for it all are almost five grand now. Five grand! That’s like, a quarter of what I’ve got. If I helped Meeko, I could only do, like, three more things on that level. And then what? The world is right back where it started. Or this one – ” She flipped to another page, about a local group finding temporary housing for youth living on the street. “This one, it’s not such a huge chunk, but still 800 bucks per kid, and that’s for temporary housing – not even a permanent solution. And with the stats they’re showing, even If I handed them the whole thing, it would only help, like, a tiny fraction of all the kids in this city that need it. So then, what’s better? Helping out four Meekos in their random emergency situations, or a handful of these kids, for maybe a few weeks each?”

Corrine had slowed her chewing but wasn’t saying anything, even though she looked like she might want to. Tessa grabbed her notebook before her sister found the words, pulling off its elastic strap and flipping it open. The letter from Mrs McPhearson slipped out. She caught it just before it hit a ketchup smear left on the table from her own breakfast a few hours earlier, and laid it carefully across the laptop’s keyboard before turning back to the notebook’s pages.

“I’ve done the math on a whole bunch of these,” Tessa said, flipping the book toward Corrine and navigating its scrawled charts and lists upside down. “Here,” she said, pointing at one, “this is all the local school teams I could find that had their funding cancelled this year. There’s no way I could do all of them, but I thought, maybe just the girls’ teams? That’s kind of a nice statement, right?”

Still not getting anything from Corrine, who was either double-checking her math or trying to read her caffeine-fuelled handwriting, Tessa flipped a few pages back and forth before finding the chart she was looking for. “Then I started going bigger. I mean, sports don’t save lives, but maybe there was some big research effort I could donate to. Honestly, though, these are so huge that Mrs McPhearsons money would barely make a dent. So then it feels like, what’s the point?” Or, on this page – ”

Corrine’s palm landed flat across the notebook’s pages, preventing Tessa from flipping. Only now that she looked up did she realize her sister had put the breakfast special aside, cutlery nestled neatly on the edge of the plate. Corrine’s eyes were locked right on Tessa, all their hesitation and questioning now replaced with a clear, determined gaze.

“Your money.” Corinne said, very plainly.

“What?” Tessa asked, even though she obviously understood the two words.

“It’s your money,” Corrine repeated, now peeling Tessa’s hands from the notebook so she could close it firmly and replace its elastic. “It’s not her money. She’s gone, and she left it to you. She left it to you because she liked you. It doesn’t matter what it says in here.” Tessa hesitated as Corrine reached for the letter. She couldn’t tell if she was worried her sister might read it, or tear it to shreds, but was consumed with the concern that it was hers – only hers – and that she already regretted letting Corinne be part of this whole thing.

Corinne didn’t read it the letter, though. She just slipped it across the front of the notebook, so it was tucked into the elastic closure, and then she laid her hands on top of the whole parcel.

“No matter what you think her motivations were with the money, the bottom line is, it’s no longer hers to give. It’s yours to have. To spend how you like, on whomever you like, or even on yourself.” She kept looking right into Tessa’s eyes, as if making sure she was tracking these statements. “How are your student loans doing, hm? Don’t you think that might be a good cause, like she might have meant? She obviously liked you. She’d probably like if you helped yourself get out of debt.”

Tessa recoiled. A small, indignant sound slipped out of her involuntarily.

Corrine brushed it off. “Anyway, that’s not even my point. My point is that this is yours now. It was meant as a gift, and not as a burden. And I can see you slipping, here.” she darted her eyes quickly from the notebook to the computer. “I can see your old habits coming back, and as your sister, I have to beg you to drop it. Do not let this consume you. Put it somewhere you can’t look at it, for a while, if you have to. Or go out and do one big thing with it so it’s over. Hell, buy yourself a car – it would stop you from borrowing the Accord all the time. Or buy me something nicer to replace the Accord, and then you can borrow that new car all you want, no complaints from me.”

She smiled now, clearly hoping a joke could ease them out of this conversation, and then leaned back, pulling her plate of room-temperature eggs and toast back toward her. “Anyway, whatever you choose to do, let’s stop talking about it. What else is new?” She picked up a triangle of toast and bit into it. “How’s the job search going?”

Tessa followed her lead, and told her sister about the few phone calls she’d had the day before this whole situation surfaced. As Corrine made her way through breakfast, Tessa packed up her laptop again, and folded the letter back into the notebook for safekeeping before tucking it all into her canvas bag. Maybe Corrine was right. She was certainly feeling the weight of this deposit in her bank account. Why was she in such a rush to get rid of it? But also so hesitant, in case she got rid of it in some less than perfect way. Is this what it would feel like when she had money of her own? So far, the only money pressure she had felt was the void it created the longer the month crept on.

When Corrine offered to get the bill, Tessa waved her off, citing that she had eaten earlier and would just put it all together. She stood up to hug Corinne, who held on a bit longer than usual, but left without saying anything else.

Tessa flagged down the server as she shrugged on her coat and wound her bag’s strap over her shoulder. When the bill and the machine were brought to her table, she discreetly punched in what was needed and set off for the bus stop, but not before leaving an 800% tip.

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About the Creator

Julia Forrester

Indoorsy Canadian. Rambler by nature. Distracted observer. Farsighted.

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