Twelve Rooms with a View

And I’m thinking, what house?

So Lucy drags me off to talk about this house, which she and Daniel and Alison clearly had already been deep in conversation about for a while, even though I had never heard of it. Which maybe I might resent? Especially as Daniel obviously has an interest but no real rights, as he is only Alison’s husband? But I’m way too busy trying to catch up and get something resembling a shred of information out of them all while we crawl to Manhattan from Hoboken through the Holland Tunnel.

This is what the conversation is like, in the crummy old beige Honda that Daniel insists on driving because even though the thing is ugly it still works:

“The lawyer says that it’s completely unencumbered. She died intestate, and that means it’s ours, that’s what the lawyer says.” This from Lucy.

“What lawyer?” I ask.

“Mom’s lawyer,” she says.

“I have a hard time believing that that is true,” Daniel says.

“Why would he lie?” Lucy shoots back at him.

“Why would a lawyer lie? I’m sorry, did you just say—”

“Yes I did. He’s our lawyer. Why would he lie?”

“You just said he was Mom’s lawyer,” I point out.

“It’s the same thing,” she tells me.

“Really?” I say. “I’ve never even heard of this guy, and I don’t know his name, and he’s my lawyer?”

“Bill left her his house,” Lucy tells me again, staying on point. “And since she died without a will that means it’s ours. Mom has left us a house.”

This entire chain of events seems strangely impossible to me. I’m always so chronically broke and lost in a kind of underworld of trouble that a stroke of luck like an actual house dropping on my head could only be true if it were literally true, and I was about to find myself like the Wicked Witch of the East squashed to death under somebody else’s house. Surely this cannot actually mean that. To get to the bottom of it all I continue to repeat things people previously said. “Bill left her his house?”

“Yes! He left her everything!” Lucy snaps.

“Didn’t he have kids?”

“Yes, in fact, he did,” Daniel pipes up. “He had two sons, two grown sons.”

“Well, didn’t he leave them something?”

“No, he didn’t,” Lucy says, firm. Daniel snorts. “What? It’s true! He didn’t leave them anything!”

“The lawyer said it wouldn’t matter whether or not they agreed to the terms of their father’s will,” Alison notes, looking at Daniel, trying to be hopeful in the face of his inexplicable pessimism about the fact that somebody left us all a house.

“If the lawyer said that, he’s a complete moron,” Daniel informs her. “I called Ira, he’s going to take a look at the documentation and let us know what kind of a mess we’re in.”

“It’s not a mess, it’s a house,” Lucy notes, sort of under her breath, kind of peevish. She doesn’t like Daniel. She thinks he’s too bossy. Which he is, considering that we didn’t all marry him, just Alison.

So we take a left out of the cemetery and go straight to the lawyer’s. There was no brunch with distant relatives and people standing around saying trivial mournful things. Which I didn’t mind being spared and I don’t know that we would have been able to find anybody who knew Mom anyway, but truly I did think that at least the four of us were planning to stop at a diner and have some eggs or a bagel. But not the Finns. We get right down to business. Before noon there we were, squashed around a really small table in a really small conference room in the saddest Manhattan office you ever saw. The walls were a nasty yellow and only half plastered together; seriously, you could see the dents where the Sheetrock was screwed into the uprights. The tabletop was that kind of Formica that vaguely looks like wood, in somebody else’s imagination. Honestly, I was thinking, this is a lawyer’s office? What kind of lawyer? There was an overweight receptionist who wore a pale green sloppy shirt which unfortunately made her look even fatter than she was, and she kept poking her head in, the first time to ask us if we wanted any coffee, and then a couple more times to tell us that Mr Long would be right with us. Then he showed up. His name was Stuart Long, and he looked like an egg. Seriously, the guy had a really handsome face, with a good head of brown hair, and then the rest of him looked like an egg. For a moment it was all I could concentrate on so I was not, frankly, paying full attention when Alison interrupted him in mid-sentence and said, “Can you tell us about the house?”

She’s not usually that aggressive, that’s more Lucy’s turf, but she was so nervous she couldn’t stop herself, apparently. “I think we all would just love to hear about the house,” she explained, immediately apologetic for having been so tentatively forceful. Daniel put his hand on hers and smiled like he forgave her.

“The house?” said the lawyer, seriously confused for a second. And I thought, Of course, they got it wrong, of course there is no house.

“Bill’s house. The message you left on our machine said Bill left Mom his house, and that the house would be part of the settlement. You left this, didn’t you leave this—”

“Well, I certainly would not have left any details about the settlement on a machine—I spoke to your husband, several times actually. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, we spoke, and you talked to me about the house,” Daniel interrupted, all snotty and impatient, like these details were really beneath him. I could see Lucy kind of stiffen up, because Daniel clearly had told her and Alison that he got “a message”, when in fact he had been having long conversations with this lawyer which he had no right to have, much less lie about.

“You mean the apartment,” Egg Man insisted.

“Yes, the apartment.” Daniel was still acting all above it all, like he was the one who had the right to be annoyed.

“So it’s not a house,” I said.

“No, it’s an apartment. Olivia had been living there. Up until her recent death.”

“Recent death, that’s an understatement,” I said.

“Yes, yes, this is I’m sure overwhelming for you,” the lawyer said, kind of nicely. He had very good manners, compared to everyone else in the room. “But I take it from your questions that you’ve never actually seen the apartment?”

“Bill didn’t like us,” I said. “So we weren’t allowed to come over.”

“He was reclusive,” Alison corrected me. “As I’m sure Mr Long is aware.”

“Mom told me he didn’t want us to come over, because Bill didn’t like us,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Alison.

“Could we get back to the point?” Lucy said. “What about this house—this apartment? We’re inheriting this place, right?”

“Yes, well—the apartment was directly willed to your mother,” Egg Man agreed. “Because her death came so close upon her husband’s the title was never officially transferred, but that will most likely be considered a technicality.”

“But it was her house,” Daniel reminded him. He was really stuck on this idea that it was a house.

“Technically it is, as I said, specifically included in the estate,” our round lawyer repeated. “Why don’t you let me walk you through this?”

“Why don’t you just tell us how much the place is worth?” Lucy threw in.

Mr Long blinked, but otherwise ignored her poor manners. “Obviously it’s not possible to be specific about the worth of the property until we have a professional evaluation,” he informed the room.

“You really don’t know?” Lucy persisted. “Like, it could be worth ten dollars or ten thousand dollars, or it could be worth a million dollars, but you don’t know?”

Before Egg Guy could answer, Daniel tried to rip control of the meeting back to his side of the table. “She’s just a little impatient,” he explained. “Sweetie, maybe we should let Mr Long—”

Lucy actually rolled her eyes at this. “Just a ballpark, Daniel sweetie,” she shot back.

Mr Long cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “Well, I guess I could—”

“Yes, why don’t you,” I said, trying to be nice because frankly I was starting to feel a little embarrassed that they were acting like this. Also, like everyone else in the room, I really wanted him to give up a number. “Just a ballpark,” I said, smiling with as much adorable charm as I could muster under the circumstances. I thought Lucy was going to gag, but it did the trick.