“I’m not going to read you the rest,” I said. “I’m not going to fight you either. Contest it if you want — Mr. Sandoval says you’d lose, but that’s your business. I’m just going to tell you one thing, and then I’m going to close this door, because I’m thirty-four weeks pregnant and I need to sit down.”
“What.”
“She pushed a broken mower out to that lawn every Tuesday for four months hoping somebody would come outside,” I said. “Four months, Mr. Higgins. She lived four hours from you and she let her grass grow to her knees hoping for company. You could have had that house for the price of a phone call, and I don’t say that to be cruel — I say it because you’re going to think about it for the rest of your life, and I’d rather you heard it from me now than figured it out alone at three in the morning in ten years.”
He didn’t answer.
He went back across the lawn and got in the car with the agent and left, and he came to the fun*ral on Saturday and sat in the front row and did not speak to me, and he did not contest the will.
The fun*ral is worth describing.
Alma Higgins had lived on Rundle Road for fifty-one years, and eleven people came.
Eleven.
I counted, sitting in the back with my hands on my stomach — her son, her son’s wife, a cousin, two women from her church, Mr. Sandoval, Sheriff Ketchum in his dress uniform, three neighbors, and me.
Fifty-one years on one street and eleven chairs.
The minister asked if anyone would like to say something, and the room did the thing rooms do, and after about six seconds Sheriff Ketchum stood up.
He is not a speech-giver.
He said this:
“Alma Higgins walked into my office at four o’clock Tuesday afternoon in ninety-five-degree heat because she’d decided something and she wasn’t going to trust the mail with it.
Eighty-two years old.
She sat in the chair in front of my desk and she said, ‘Amos, I need a favor and it’s going to sound peculiar.’
And it did sound peculiar.
And I did it anyway, because in nineteen years that woman never once asked me for anything, and because there is one particular kind of person you say yes to without asking why, and she was that kind.
That’s all I’ve got. I’m not good at this.”
He sat down.
Nobody else stood up.
And I sat in the back of a fun*ral home and understood, with total clarity, that the eleven-person turnout was the whole reason she’d done what she did — that a woman can live on a street for fifty-one years and mow her own grass and bury her husband and still end up with eleven chairs and a son who asks what the house is worth, and that somewhere in April, watching a pregnant neighbor carry her mail in face-down, Alma Higgins had decided she was going to spend everything she had on the one person who might turn out differently.
PART 5 — FINAL
My son was born three weeks later.
Walter Higgins Halloway.
I asked her attorney whether it was strange, using a de*d man’s name for a baby who’d never meet him, and Mr. Sandoval — sixty-eight, and Mrs. Higgins’s lawyer for thirty-one years — took off his glasses and said, “Ms. Halloway, in thirty-one years, that woman asked me for exactly two things she wasn’t legally entitled to. One was whether I could find a way for a person to leave a house to a stranger without the family being able to break it. The other was whether Walter’s name would go anywhere after they were gone.”
“She asked that?”
“In April,” he said. “She said, ‘Nobody’s going to be named for him, Sandoval. That’s the part that gets me.'”
I named him Walter.
And I want to be honest about something, because it’s the part I’m least proud of and it’s the reason I understand Mrs. Higgins better than I understand myself sometimes.
For three weeks after the fun*ral, I couldn’t go into her house.
I had the keys.
I owned it.
And I’d stand at the fence with a hand on my stomach and not be able to make myself walk up the step, because it felt like theft, because a small vicious voice in me kept saying you cut some grass, Wren, you cut some grass and took a house.
It was Sheriff Ketchum who fixed that, and he did it by accident.
He came by in September with a box of her things the county had held, and I said the thing out loud — “I only cut the grass” — and he set the box down on my porch and said:
“Ma’am, I’ve been in this job nineteen years. You want to know what people do when they see an old woman struggling with a mower?”
“What?”
