CHAPTER 34

“Susan! Joanna!” We shot up from the sofa like soldiers at reveille. “It hurts. Get in here.” He was sitting on the edge of the bed smoking. “I can’t sleep,” he said. The light blazed in his room. “I’ve been looking at these magazines.” He pointed to a stack at his feet. “So I was reading this magazine and I had a revelation.”

“It’s good you were able to read,” Susan said.

“Sometimes I can do a page. So I’m reading New York and John Simon writes these nasty things about Barbra Streisand and I have this revelation. You wanna hear it?”

“Sure,” we said.

“Everything is both true and not true.”

Susan and I exchanged a look. He woke us up for this?

“Listen, I have to ask you girls a question, a favor. This is important.” He patted the bed and we sat down, the three of us in a row facing his dresser against the wall, above it the only photo of him as a small child, fists balled, in his sailor suit. Aunt Adele had sent the photograph years ago, in a fancy frame wrapped as a gift. “I want to know if both of you will give your inheritance to your mother,” he said. “You know, if I leave you money in my will, you’ll give it over to her.”

I glanced across the hall at Brenda’s closed door. Was she listening? Would she be angry knowing the concern he had for our mother? I desperately wanted to go back to sleep. “What are you talking about?” I said. “You’re going to get better.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But I want to know if you’ll give up your inheritance.”

The whole thing was strange, waking us in the middle of the night to tell us what? That we were being disinherited. Why did he have to put it that way, “give up our inheritance,” as if he were cutting us off and casting us out, rejecting us for some trespass or disloyalty? “Yes, of course,” I said. I should have said no, I should have realized his request was anguished, that he really wanted to leave money directly to my mother so that he did not have to ask this of us, but he was afraid of Brenda. We should have realized his choice of words was a clue, a warning. He was provoking us, trying to get us to object and stake our claim the way Brenda so confidently staked her claim.