“Wrong and wrong,” Riley disagreed. “He’s in debt at the dog track, and we have to cover his gambling losses unless we want some goodfellas to take out our kneecaps. And he burned all of our baby pictures and childhood mementos, and we each get a plastic baggie with the ashes. But they’re all unmarked because fuck us.”
“That one’s good,” I said.
“You’re all wrong,” she murmured. Pushing away from the table, Shannon grabbed the whiskey and glasses, quickly distributing them and uncapping the bottle with quivering hands. “Aunt Mae used to say ‘There’s a fine line between being an alcoholic and being an Irishman. Drunks are always assholes.’”
“That bad?” I asked when she poured three fingers into my glass.
“She also said ‘What whiskey won’t cure cannot be cured,’ so bottoms up, boys.”
“I never knew Aunt Mae was such a drunk, or a philosopher,” Riley said. “I guess we have something to be thankful for after all.”
“Oh yeah,” I replied. “She took a drink upstairs with her every night. An alligator could have been spooning with her in bed, and she never would have noticed.”
When the glasses were empty, Shannon nodded and passed the bottle around again. “Let me get this out.” She glanced at the document, the liquid in her glass lapping against the rim as her hand shook.
I placed my hand on Shannon’s shoulder and squeezed, and she responded with a patient smile. A Jack Russell terrier was definitely involved.
“Okay. Here goes. Assets were distributed in rather standard terms. Angus left two hundred and fifty thousand to Cornell.”
“Figures,” Riley said.
Cornell was the only family tradition that survived to my generation. Matt, Sam, and I studied at Cornell’s architecture school, and Sam and I picked up our Masters of Architecture there while Matt went to MIT’s grad program in structural engineering.
Riley attended Rhode Island School of Design’s architecture program. On top of Riley’s decision to stray from the herd, he frequently revealed shocking gaps in knowledge, forcing us to keep an eagle eye on his work. We suspected those gaps were more about Riley than RISD.
“His stake in Walsh Associates is to be divided between the six of us, and that stake can be cashed out or reinvested.”
She took a deep breath, and I braced myself for the ax to fall.
“He invested five hundred thousand in Walsh Associates, with the earmark that it pays off the loan on the office.”
“What?” I slapped both hands on the table in shock. My siblings wore the same stunned expressions.
“He decides to invest in us now?” Sam yelled. “Are you fucking kidding me? After we drained everything to start the goddamn business and mortgaged our asses off to buy that place?”
“And,” Shannon continued, “he left the house in Wellesley, and all its contents, to us. We are free to sell it, although the will states he wants it restored first. He left money for that purpose.”
“Which may still contain twenty years of milk crates and bottle caps,” Matt said.
“And the ashes of my baby pictures,” Riley added.
“Dude, you’re the fifth kid. There were never pictures of you,” Sam said.
“There’s more.”
We gazed at Shannon, all slightly terrified to hear anything else.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. Everything Angus left would have fallen into reasonable territory if he had been a reasonable father. He wasn’t. He was a demonic jackass who got off on abandoning us to raise ourselves while getting in regular jabs about us letting Mom die on our watch. We would have been more receptive to his final requests if they didn’t sting like one last slap in the face, a reminder that he hated us.
“This is where the ass raping starts,” Sam muttered. A sure sign of Sam’s intoxication was the slip in his vocabulary. He loved sounding erudite, yet never managed to pull it off drunk.
“He left two million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It’s only for research and treatment for preeclampsia. Anything left after the disposal of the estate goes into a trust for equal division among…his future grandchildren. It will be made available on their twenty-fifth birthdays, in addition to one hundred thousand already in the trust.”
Holding the memories of Mom’s death alongside a future generation was uncomfortable at best, unfathomable at worst. It didn’t take much to relive the horrible moments of her death or the long road that followed, but imagining the possibility of our own children in the same thought felt wrong.
Even with five siblings, we were always somewhat incomplete. Angus’s death didn’t orphan us. We were orphaned the day my mother died. For us, family was far more fragile than it seemed at first glance.
One by one, we drained our glasses and darted glances at each other in bewildered silence.
