“What do you mean Grandmere Labeaux is dead? You mean she just died?” Shifting the phone to her other ear, Lauren leaned back in her chair; this could be a lengthy call.
“That’s what I’ve been telling you. I just now hung up with Millicent, she told me a Slidell lawyer called her this morning. Evidently Grandmere Labeaux died and left her entire estate to the five of us. Isn’t that strange?”
Lauren chewed on her bottom lip for a second. “I thought she had died, like, twenty or thirty years ago.” She did some quick calculations in her head. “That would have meant she was, what?, almost a hundred years old?”
Her sister, Danielle, picked up that train of thought. “I think she must have been older than that. She had Mom pretty late in life, especially for those days.”
Both sisters were quiet for a moment. “Danielle, do you think she knew about Mom?” whenever Lauren thought of their mother, it caused a lump to rise in her throat … a year wasn’t nearly long enough to get past the grief of her dying.
“I don’t know … wait … I think Millicent said the will indicated something like: ‘leave my entire estate to my last surviving relatives; my five granddaughters’ …so she must have known.”
“Then that means she knew about Aunt Adelaide’s death, too.”
“I suppose so, but I don’t remember Millicent mentioning Grandmere Labeaux at her mom’s funeral. And she and her sisters were just as shocked when that lawyer called.”
“Why didn’t she try to get in contact with any of us? I would think she would have wanted to reach out to us, no matter what had happened in the past. It’s hard to believe she didn’t want to say something to us.”
“Yes”, Danielle agreed. “But our family is so messed up, it really shouldn’t surprise us. Let’s face it, none of us even knew she was still alive; now that is pretty pathetic.”
“Yeah, your right, that really is pathetic.” They talked for a few more minutes, then they hung up, with Danielle promising to call her toward the beginning of the following week when she expected to hear more.
Lauren leaned back in the kitchen chair and blew out a frustrated puff of air. It just didn’t seem right that with what little family they actually had, that no one tried to keep in contact with each other. To say their family was not close was an understatement. Her mom had rarely spoken about Grandmere Labeaux, so Lauren had always felt something big must have happened between her grandmother and her children, she just had no idea what.
She shook her head and looked at all of the papers laid out on the table. Pushing thoughts of family aside, she pulled off the next test from the pile and returned to her grading.
A few days later, Danielle called again and Lauren was immediately leery. Her sister sounded too cheery, like she had something to tell her that she knew she wouldn’t like and was trying to get into her good graces before springing it on her. She was right.
“… I’ve just been talking to Millicent. She had a realtor check out that property of grandma’s and to tell the truth, it’s not worth much of anything.”
“Well, we really hadn’t thought it would, all we ever heard Mom say about where she was raised was that ‘nothing good ever comes from the bayou’. Not exactly a rave review for the place.”
“But someone should go down and clean out the cottage. You know, retrieve anything that’s personal, make sure all the bills are paid, clean it up a bit … you know, all of that stuff.”
YOU ARE READING
An Inheritance
General FictionLauren heads to Louisiana to attend to her grandmother's 'estate' ... she had never met her and in fact, none of her relatives had even known she had still been alive all of those years ... as Lauren unravels her grandmother's past, she begins to un...
