Steve picked up a document and passed it across to Cyril. “The will. All pretty simple.”
Pushing himself up from the depths of the leather chair, Cyril took the papers then sank back down with the seat exhaling beneath him. Last Will and Testament. Helen Mary Teresa Andrachuk. He stared at the print, the thick bold lettering, the smooth white paper. Was he supposed to read it all right then and there? He paged through, noting titles and clauses and subclauses marked with Roman numerals. V was five, X was ten, and C was a hundred. Or was C fifty and L a hundred? Aware of Steve and Chuckie watching him he adopted a discerning expression.
Steve paged through his own copy and repeated that it was all fairly straightforward, and for the next half hour he talked while Chuckie began to snore.
Cyril did his best to follow all the legalese, the pursuants and heretofores, and finally blurted: “Who gets the house?”
“Well, you. Just like I’ve been saying.”
Cyril waited for just what he hadn’t been saying.
“Chuck and I get twenty-five thousand cash and everything else is yours.” His clean-shaven face was wide and smooth and open while his cheeks glowed with a purplish flush. “Though,” he cautioned, “this is all contingent upon—” he coughed “—a psychiatric evaluation.”
Cyril moved back through the phrase with caution, like a tightrope walker going in reverse. Evaluation. Psychiatric. Contingent.
Chuckie was sitting forward now while Steve sat with his fingers on the edge of his desk as if about to play a piano—or leap back in case uncle Cyril got violent.
“Psychiatric evaluation?”
Steve shrugged at a hard but inescapable fact.
“I go to a shrink?”
“That you, yes, well—” Steve swayed his head side-to-side as if to say that was a bit blunt. “That you discuss a few things and get the thumbs up. Either that or I take control of the house.” He tagged this last part on as though it was scarcely worth mentioning.
“You get the house.”
Steve backtracked. “Take control of the house. But you’d live in it. If you want.”
“But you’d own it.”
Steve had no choice but to nod at his uncle’s lamentably simplistic phrasing. “In effect.”
Cyril gripped his knees to steady himself. See a shrink or Steve got his mother’s estate. He looked at Chuckie who pretended to be absorbed by the state of his fingernails. Cyril understood: his breakdown. He preferred to think of it as his lapse, his episode, his brief bad patch due to guilt over his brother’s death. Others saw it more bluntly: it was a breakdown.
“It’s just that grandma was concerned,” said Steve. “The house is worth a lot and you have to be careful these days. Real estate is very turbulent.”
Cyril envisioned a grim panel of experts listening to Steve and Chuckie describe their uncle’s erratic mental state. “Sure. Of course.”
“And there’s that business with the gun,” said Steve.
“That was self-defence,” said Cyril. “There were three of them. And anyway, it was twenty years ago.”
Steve was nodding. “Absolutely. No doubt. But actually I meant the other business.” Steve consulted some papers. “Darrel Stavrik. There’s no police record, but grandma, well, she told me about it. And hey, believe me, if you fired a few shots at the guy I’m sure he earned it.” Steve put up his hands as if to say far be it from him to question the judgement of his uncle Cyril. “I mean, I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but grandma felt it prudent to fill me in.”
So Darrel had told her what had happened and she’d never in all those years confronted Cyril about it. What self-control. What reserve. The will was her revenge, served up as cold as her very own grave. He congratulated her on such impressive patience. Well played, ma, well played. Cyril experienced an epiphany: she found greater satisfaction in being the martyr than being happy, so collected icons and never again tried to find another man after Darrel.
Steve hurried on to another point, explaining what uncle Cyril-the-house-painter could not be expected to grasp, the fragility of financial markets, worldwide recession, political upheaval, flux and ferment, the mounting frenzy at the approach of the millennium. “And right here at home,” he said, as if the barbarians were at the gate. “There’s fraud to be wary of. Do you have call display? No?” He winced at the pain caused by such a dangerous state of affairs, as if dear uncle Cyril was living in a mine field. “I have call display. Chucko has call display. I think it’s prudent. You should really get on that ASAP. In fact, I’m going to arrange it for you myself.” He made a note on his blotter and underlined it twice. “Telephone fraud perpetrated on senior citizens is up three hundred and twenty percent.”
“Senior citizen? I’m fifty!”
“Sure. Of course. I didn’t mean anything. Only you’re wise to be prepared. They know all the angles, these guys. And it’s not guys, usually it’s women. Believe me, when the day comes, I’ll want Courtenay and Candace there looking out for me. Right now that’s what Chucko and I are doing for you. Just like grandma wished.” He raised his eyebrows in an innocent expression and then exhaled a long breath and stood, jingling his keys like bells in his pockets signalling that it was time for Cyril to go. Eager to escape, Cyril stood as well, noting again the photos of himself on the walclass="underline" him smiling in the sun, him with his hands on his hips ready to take on the world. No, he’d never drawn his mother.
THREE
CYRIL LEFT STEVE’S office with a copy of the will, the name of the psychiatrist, and the date of the first of five appointments, a week Friday, eleven days from now. Just as grandma wished… The words stood as black as bruises. Still, it was a spring day and he’d escaped his nephews even if more torment awaited. How much happier life had been as a child, the days longer, the sun warmer, the sky brighter, the horizon wide and clear and inviting. At the age of fifty he seemed to have crested a hill, except the view was not a pleasing panorama but a low dark forest of withered trees that he had no choice but to enter and from which, he knew, he’d never depart.
Passing Chuckie’s van he glanced in at a slew of textbooks and papers and magazines and Styrofoam coffee cups, as well as a midden of torn and twisted tickets from the racetrack. Farther along the street was a London Drugs. He entered and found the Aspirin. He really wanted codeine, but the over-the-counter type had caffeine and he did not want to stay awake; he wanted to escape, to sleep, to dive down into the mud and stay there for a year or two. En route to the check-out he saw a rack of Do-It-Yourself booklets. Do-It-Yourself Divorce Guide, Do-It-Yourself Tax Guide, Do-It-Yourself Will Guide. He was tempted to take the one on wills. Otherwise, if he croaked—and given the way he felt that seemed imminent—Chuckie and Steve would get everything, or whatever he had, which, if he didn’t do something soon might not be much. Were they that desperate, that greedy? He decided that the best plan was to deal with this psychiatrist and then sell the house and blow the money. Maybe buy a yacht and sink it, or fund an orphanage in Ukraine. Either way, use it all up and leave Steve and Chuckie zip… maybe a note and his mother’s collection of icons. He grabbed the Do-It-Yourself Will Guide and headed for the checkout.
The cashier was a young woman with pale skin, black hair, a ring in her lower lip, another in her eyebrow, and too many to count in her ears. She yawned and looked through him. What with his receding hair and advancing years he’d begun to sense that he was dissolving, that he was becoming transparent, no more substantial than smoke—the smoke not of a blaze but of a dying fire—and that by the time he was sixty he’d be a ghost. As he went out the door he wondered if that meant he’d be able to walk through walls.