Chapter 2: Only Hannah
I want to tell you I opened it right away. I didn’t. I sat back on my heels with the envelope in my lap and listened to the house tick and settle below me, and I was sixteen again.
Grandma Ruth got sick the winter I turned fourteen. Pancreas. The doctors said months, and she gave them two years out of spite.
Mom visited on Sundays, for about an hour. Brooke visited twice, and cried so hard in the car the second time that Mom said it wasn’t fair to put her through it. Dad didn’t go. Dad said hospitals made him “useless.”
So it was me. Every day after school, two bus transfers, a backpack full of homework. I learned how to flush a PICC line. I learned which nurse snuck her extra pudding. I read her the obituaries out loud because she liked to see who she’d outlived, and she’d say, “Ha. Marjorie Pruitt. Told you.”
At night she held my hand while she fell asleep. Her grip was the last strong thing about her.
The week before she died, she put the locket in my palm and folded my fingers over it. “I’ve taken care of you,” she said. “You remember that when they tell you otherwise.”
I thought she meant the locket.
I slid the papers out of the envelope.
The first was a letter, one page, her handwriting.
My Hannah,
If you are reading this, you are grown, and I hope you are happy. You gave me the best part of a hard ending. You never once looked at the clock. So I have set aside what is left of my house for your schooling and for your start in life. It’s in a trust at First Harbor, and your mother knows.
This is for Hannah, and only Hannah. She earned it holding my hand.
Buy something silly, too. I mean it. Love, Grandma.
I read it four times. The fourth time, the words swam and I had to press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
Under the letter was a copy of her will, eleven pages, stapled, signed and notarized in 2007. I’m not a lawyer, but I could read Article Four fine. The net proceeds from the sale of my residence at 14 Larkin Street shall be held in trust for the benefit of my granddaughter, Hannah Marie Doyle, for her education and for her establishment in life.
Under that, a letter from First Harbor Bank & Trust, dated 2008, confirming the trust was funded.
Initial balance: $212,000.00.
I said it out loud, to nobody. “Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars.”
Grandma’s house on Larkin Street. Mom had told us it went to pay the hospice. That there was nothing left. That we should be grateful the estate didn’t drag the family into debt.
Nothing but medical bills.
I got up too fast and cracked my head on a rafter, and I didn’t even feel it.
Maybe the money was still there. Maybe they’d been saving it, waiting for a moment, waiting until I was “grown” the way the envelope said. Maybe I’d go downstairs and Mom would cry and say, We were going to tell you at the party. I wanted that so badly my chest hurt.
There was a second, thinner bundle at the bottom of the box. Held with a black binder clip.
Bank forms. Four of them. Each one a single sheet, First Harbor’s blue logo at the top. Trust Distribution Request.
The first was dated March 2009. Amount: $31,500. Under Purpose, someone had written in neat blue ink: Tuition — Brooke.
My stomach turned over.
The second, August 2009. $34,000. Tuition — Brooke.
The third, November 2009. $46,500. Brooke — car + housing.
The fourth, January 2010. $100,000. House fund — B.
Every one of them came to zero in the end. I did the math twice. $212,000. Gone in eleven months.
At the bottom of each form were two signature lines.
Parent or Guardian: Gary R. Doyle. Dad’s cramped, slanted signature. I’d know it anywhere. It was on every permission slip of my childhood.
And above it, on the line marked Beneficiary, in round, careful, looping cursive I had never written in my life:
Hannah M. Doyle.
I’m left-handed. My signature looks like a seismograph. It always has.
In March 2009, I was seventeen years old. I was working the fryer at Culver’s and filling out financial aid forms at the kitchen table, because Mom said college was “a choice, not a right.”
Somebody had signed my name.
Four times.
