Lost Cause (2 page)

TWO

“Good afternoon,” the lawyer said as he settled himself behind the largest desk I had ever seen. The eleven other people in the room mumbled a response. I remained silent.

The room was big, but it still felt stuffy with so many people in it. The walls were paneled in dark wood, and the one behind the desk was a solid mass of glass-fronted bookcases filled with regimented rows of identical legal books. It looked as if the place had been arranged by DJ at his most compulsively neat.

The six adults—Mom, her three sisters and two of my uncles—sat on a huge, overstuffed leather couch and a loveseat in front of the lawyer's desk. DJ and two of my cousins, Spencer and Webb, sat in three similar armchairs. My other cousins, Bunny and Adam, perched on the wide arms of one of the chairs. I stood at the back. Before the lawyer came in, Mom had looked up at me and patted the arm of the sofa beside her, but I had shaken my head. I was here, but I didn't have to be part of the proceedings. A shiny black, flat-screen TV sat in a cabinet to one side as if it was watching us all.

The lawyer was talking, thanking us for coming, making some minor asides to put us at ease and saying what a wonderful man Grandfather had been, but I wasn't listening. I was thinking I could probably live comfortably for a week in Europe on what the lawyer's suit cost.

Now he was going on about selling assets and splitting the money between Mom and her sisters. That was good. Mom deserved a break. The cottage was to be kept and shared among us all. Great, I thought, that really is where I'm going to spend the summer. Then he said something that caught my attention.

“This is without a doubt one of the most unusual clauses that I have ever been asked to put in a will.”

I wasn't the only one interested. The lawyer was slowly scanning the room, and everyone was staring back at him like mice mesmerized by a snake.

“I know you are all anxious to hear about these undertakings,” the lawyer continued. “However, I cannot share them with all of you.” A burst of protest came from several relatives, but he raised his hands. “Please, please! You will all be fully informed, but not all of you will be informed at the same time. Some people will have to leave the room prior to the undertakings being read.”

“Wonderful,” I murmured under my breath. “All the fuss about coming, and I'm going to be sent out with the other kids.”

“Therefore,” the lawyer went on, “as per the terms of the will, I request that the grandsons—”

“I'm not going anywhere,” I blurted out. Everyone turned to stare at me. I hadn't meant to say anything out loud, it just kind of escaped. Since I had been forced to come here, I wanted to stay for the only bit that promised to be remotely interesting. “I don't want to be kicked out of the room,” I concluded weakly.

“You'll go if you're told to go.” Trust DJ to butt in. He probably felt I was embarrassing the family. Same old, same old.

“You don't understand.” The lawyer looked at DJ. “He
can
stay.”

“If he's staying, then I'm staying as well,” DJ said.

“Me too,” Webb pitched in, and a babble of voices erupted around the room.

The lawyer stood up. “Could everybody please just stop,” he said in a voice that any of my teachers would have been proud of. “Please, I am reading a will. Decorum is needed. Out of respect for the deceased, you all need to follow his directions. Is that understood?”

Everyone fell silent. “Sorry,” DJ said.

“Me too,” I added sheepishly.

“Before I go on, I need to ask
everybody
”—he looked hard across the room at me—“to agree to respect the terms of his will—
all
the terms of his will.”

I nodded; so did everyone else. “Of course we agree,” my mother said.

“Excellent.” The lawyer sat back down. “Now, I need everyone except the six grandsons to leave the room.”

Now it was the adults' turn to blurt out objections.

“What?” Charlotte, Webb's mother, asked.

“Did you say all the adults have to leave?” Aunt Debbie added.

“Yes.” The lawyer nodded. “Everyone except the grandsons.”

A broad grin spread across my face as the adults filed out in confusion. I had been dumb to blurt out my complaint based on a wrong assumption, but my aunts and uncles had been no better. They had stayed quiet only because they had made the same assumption as me. When that turned out to be wrong, they had blurted out their complaints just as I had.

My mother was the last adult to leave the room. As she left, she smiled back at DJ and closed the door. My cousins spread out into the vacant seats. I stayed standing at the back.

“Well, gentlemen,” the lawyer said, clasping his hands beneath his chin. “I am assuming that nobody saw this coming.”

“Grandpa was always full of surprises,” Bunny said.

“So,” I said, feeling more comfortable now that the adults had left, “I guess because of that we're
not
that surprised.”

“Interesting perspective,” the lawyer said. “The only way you would have been surprised is if he didn't do something to surprise you.”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“So if he'd done nothing then you would have actually been surprised, which wouldn't have been a surprise. Sort of a Catch-22, don't you think?”

“Do you think, sir, that we could go on?” DJ said. I flashed him a vicious glare for being so pompous, but he ignored me. “I believe we're all anxious to hear what you're going to tell us.”

“I'm sure you are,” the lawyer said. “But, actually,
I'm
not going to tell you anything. Your
grandfather
is.”

Everyone tensed at that, and I caught DJ glancing toward the door as if he expected Grandfather to walk through it.

“I'm going to play a video your grandfather made.” The lawyer picked up a remote and pointed it at the shiny black TV. “I was in the room when your grandfather recorded this.” He pressed a button and the TV flickered into life. “I think
all
of you will be at least a little surprised by what he has to say.” He pressed a second button, and Grandfather appeared on the screen.

I watched, enthralled. We all did. I know I had never felt particularly close to Grandfather, but it was weird seeing and hearing him almost from beyond the grave.

“I'm not sure why I have to be wearing makeup,” he said to someone off camera. “This is my will, not some late-night talk show…and it's certainly not a
live
taping.” The figure off camera laughed, and I found myself smiling. That was the sort of black humor I enjoyed.

“Good morning…or afternoon, boys,” he began, turning to face the camera and us. “If you're watching this, I must be dead, although on this fine afternoon I feel very much alive.” Grandfather looked exactly as I remembered him, wearing his trademark black beret and the sweater I remembered Mom knitting him a couple of winters ago.

“I want to start off by saying that I don't want you to be sad. I had a good life and I wouldn't change a minute of it. That said, I still hope that you are at least a little sad and that you miss having me around. After all, I was one
spectacular
grandpa!”

A chuckle rose from the group, and I had to admit that I did miss him, now that I could only see him on TV.

“And you were simply the best grandsons a man could ever have. I want you to know that of all the joys in my life, you were among my greatest. From the first time I met each of you to the last moments I spent with you”—Grandfather smiled slightly—“and of course I don't know what those last moments were, but I know they were wonderful, I want to thank you all for being part of my life. A very big, special, wonderful, warm part of my life.”

It was soppy and sentimental. I knew that, but it didn't stop a tear forming in the corner of my eye as I watched the old man reach forward and take a sip of water from the glass on the desk in front of him. His hand shook ever so slightly. Was he nervous? He never struck me as someone who felt fear.

“I wanted to record this rather than have my lawyer read it out to you.” A smile turned the corners of my grandfather's lips up. “Hello, Johnnie.”

“Hello, Davie,” the lawyer replied with a matching smile.

Grandfather glanced off screen. “I hope you appreciate that twenty-year-old bottle of Scotch I left you. And you better not have had more than one snort of it before the reading of my will.” He looked back at us and winked.

The lawyer held up two fingers.

“But knowing you the way I do, I suspect you would have had two.”

The lawyer looked embarrassed. “He did know me well.”

I shook my head to try and get rid of the feeling of weirdness. Here was my dead grandfather talking to us and his lawyer in this room and also to the same lawyer who was at the recording of the message. It was eerie.

“I just thought I wanted—needed—to say goodbye to all of you in person. Or at least as in person as this allows.

“Life is an interesting journey, one that seldom takes you where you think you might be going. Certainly, I never expected that I was going to ever become an old man. In fact, there were more than a few times when I was a boy that I didn't believe I was going to live to see another day, never mind live long enough to grow old.

“But I did live a long and wonderful life. I was blessed to meet the love of my life, your grandmother Vera. It's so sad that she passed on before any of you had a chance to meet her. I know people never speak ill of the dead—and I'm counting on you all to keep up that tradition with me—but your grandmother was simply the most perfect woman in the world. Her only flaw, as far as I can see, was being foolish enough to marry me.”

As Grandfather talked on about how proud he was of his daughters—our mothers—and how he had loved coming to all our school plays and soccer games, my mind began to wander. Something he'd said in the video was nagging at me. My brow furrowed in concentration. He'd often talked about his time as a pilot in the Second World War, but I'd never heard him refer to almost dying as a boy. What did it all mean? I didn't know any stories from before his time as a pilot. What had he done when he was younger that made him think he was going to die? It was a mystery.

The flickering image on the screen drew me back to Grandfather and his story. Mom had guilted me into coming today, but wild horses couldn't have dragged me away now.

Grandfather was finishing off his account of how much joy we had brought him. “You boys, you wonderful, incredible, lovely boys, have been such a blessing…seven blessings…”

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed DJ tense up. Then I realized why. There were six grandsons, not seven. Was the old man's brain not as sharp as he thought? His voice caught and he covered it by taking a long sip of water.

“But I didn't bring you here simply to tell you how much I loved you all,” he went on eventually. “Being part of your lives was one of the greatest achievements of my life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but being there for all your big moments meant that I couldn't be elsewhere. I've done a lot, but it doesn't seem that time is going to permit me the luxury of doing everything I wished for. So, I have some requests, some
last
requests.”

The six of us looked at each other, but everyone was as confused as I was.

“In the possession of my lawyer are some envelopes. One for each of you.”

Six heads swung around, as if programmed, to look at the lawyer. He smiled and waved a fan of manila envelopes at us.

Grandfather reclaimed our attention. “Each of these requests, these tasks, has been specifically selected for you to fulfill. All of the things you will need to complete your task will be provided—money, tickets, guides. Everything.

“I am not asking any of you to do anything stupid or unnecessarily reckless—certainly nothing as stupid or reckless as I did at your ages.”

There it was again, a reference to mysterious things he had done as a boy. What was going on?

“Your parents may be worried, but I have no doubts. Just as I have no doubts that you will all become fine young men. I am sad that I will not be there to watch you all grow into the incredible men I know you will become. But I don't need to be there to know that will happen. I am so certain of that. As certain as I am that I will be there with you as you complete my last requests, as you continue your life journeys.”

The air in the room felt heavy with silence. We were barely breathing. Grandfather lifted his glass. “A final toast,” he said, “to the best grandsons a man could ever have.” He tipped back the glass, drained it, replaced it on the table and stared at us. “I love you all so much. Good luck.”

The screen went black, and we all let out the breath we hadn't realized we had been holding. The lawyer switched off the TV. “In my hands are the seven envelopes. One for each grandson.”