**PART 3**
“Mr. Carter? This is Leonard Price. I was Eleanor Whitlock’s attorney.”
I knew the name. Eleanor had mentioned him. He’d handled her husband’s estate and written her will. He was seventy-something, she’d said, and the only lawyer in Harlan she trusted, because he’d been her student in 1983 and she’d failed him in tenth-grade English and he’d thanked her for it twenty years later.
“Mr. Price,” I said. “If this is about the waiver, I already…”
“It’s not about the waiver,” he said. “Although I saw it. That was a fine thing you did, son. Eleanor said you would.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Mr. Carter,” he said. “Eleanor left you something. It’s not in the will. It’s not part of the estate. And I can’t discuss it over the phone.”
My stomach went tight.
“She told me,” I said slowly. “She told me she wasn’t leaving me anything. Not a cent. That’s what she wanted. That’s what I wanted.”
“Not a cent,” Leonard Price agreed. “That’s exactly right. She was very particular about that. There’s no money involved.” He paused. “But there’s something else. And you’ll have to come collect it immediately. Today, if you can. Tomorrow at the latest.”
“Why immediately?”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“You’ll understand when you get here,” he said. “My office is on Main Street, above the bakery. Come as soon as you can.”
I drove there that afternoon. I skipped my study group. I didn’t even go home first.
Leonard Price’s office was two small rooms up a narrow staircase that smelled like bread. He was short and round, with white hair and suspenders and a bow tie, and a framed tenth-grade English paper on the wall behind his desk with a big red F on it. In Eleanor’s handwriting, at the top, it said: You can do better. I know you can. See me.
He shook my hand. He held on a long time.
“Sit down, Mr. Carter,” he said. “We have a lot to go through, and not much time.”
He took a cardboard box out from under his desk. It was old. The kind of box copy paper comes in. On the lid, in black marker, in handwriting I knew better than my own, it said:
OWEN. NOT PART OF THE ESTATE. DO NOT LET MY CHILDREN TOUCH THIS.
I stared at it.
“She brought this to me in May,” Leonard said. “Well. Dolores brought it, actually. Eleanor sent her with it. Along with very detailed instructions.” He opened his desk drawer and took out a single sheet of paper. “Before we open the box, I’m supposed to read you this.”
He put on his reading glasses. He cleared his throat.
“Leonard,” he read. “If you’re reading this to Owen, it means I’m dead and my children are behaving exactly as I predicted. Do not let him argue with you. He’ll try to give everything back. He’s like that. Tell him these things are not money and are not part of my estate, because I gave them to him while I was alive and of sound mind, as gifts, which Dr. Lowe will confirm, and which you have in writing with my signature and a witness. Tell him that if he tries to refuse any of it, I will haunt him. I mean it. I taught tenth grade for thirty-four years. I know how to haunt people.”
Leonard took off his glasses. He was smiling.
“Then she wrote, ‘Start with the envelope. Then the DVD. Then the books. Then go get Dickens. Do not wait. Mildred’s moving on Friday.’”
“Who’s Dickens?” I said.
“You’ll see,” said Leonard. “Envelope first.”
He opened the box and took out a large manila envelope. My name was on the front.
Inside was a letter. Four pages, handwritten, in shaky blue ink. I recognized the shake. She’d written it in May, when her hands were still mostly steady.
I’m not going to share all of it. Most of it is mine. But I’ll share the beginning, and I’ll share the end.
Owen,
You’re angry with me right now. I can feel it from wherever I am. You’re thinking, she promised. She said not a cent. Well, I kept my promise. Not a cent. Not one dollar. You’ll see.
But I never said I wouldn’t leave you anything.
I told you I wouldn’t leave you money because money is what my children understand, and money is what they’d use against you, and I wanted there to be nothing for them to point at. I knew what they’d say. I’ve known Philip and Gwen for forty years. I raised them. I love them, God help me, and I know exactly who they are. They’d look at a twenty-two-year-old boy and a dying old woman and they’d see a transaction, because that’s all they’ve ever seen when they looked at me.
So I gave them nothing to see.
But I’m not going to leave you with nothing. I’m going to leave you with the truth. Which is the only thing I ever really had to give anyone.
There was more. Pages more. About Robert. About her father. About the first time she heard me argue about Cathy Ames and thought, oh, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you for sixty-eight years.
And at the end:
You told me once you don’t trust happy endings. I told you that you hadn’t had enough life to know what’s real.
I’ve had enough life now. I’ve had sixty-nine years. Most of them were quiet and dutiful and lonely. And then, at the very end, I got six months of being loved by someone who wanted nothing from me except my company.
That’s a happy ending, Owen. Don’t you dare let anyone tell you it wasn’t.
Go get Dickens. He’s waiting.
All my love, and I mean all of it,
Eleanor
P.S. The ring is in the small envelope. Don’t eat it. It’s eight months old and hard as a rock. I wanted you to have it back. I wanted you to know I wore it until the end. It’s the only piece of jewelry I’ve ever owned that I was proud of.
I tipped the small envelope into my palm.
The Haribo ring fell out. Red gone pale and cloudy. Green jewel faded to the color of sea glass. Hard as glass.
I closed my hand around it.
Leonard Price sat very still behind his desk and looked out the window for a long time while I cried.
When I could breathe again, he took out the DVD.
“She recorded this in May,” he said. “In her room at Willowbrook. Dr. Lowe was there. Dr. Feldman. Dolores. And me.” He slid it into an old laptop on his desk and turned the screen toward me. “She said you should watch it before the hearing. And she said her children should watch it at the hearing.”
The video started.
It was Eleanor’s room. Room 312. The chair by the window. The parking lot outside. Eleanor was sitting up in bed in a blue cardigan, her glasses on their beaded chain, the gummy ring on her finger. She looked thinner than I remembered. And very calm.
She looked straight into the camera.
“My name is Eleanor Ruth Whitlock,” she said. “Today is May the twelfth. I’m sixty-nine years old. I’m making this recording in the presence of my physician, Dr. Ruth Feldman, my evaluating psychiatrist, Dr. Patricia Lowe, my nurse, Dolores Martinez, and my attorney, Leonard Price. I’m making it because I know my children, and I know what they’re going to do after I die.”
She took a breath.
“I’m going to marry Owen Carter in June. I’m doing it because I want to. Nobody has pressured me. Nobody has coerced me. Owen proposed to me with a ring made out of candy, and I said yes, and if I’d had any sense, I’d have proposed to him first.”
In the background, I heard Dolores laugh.
“I’ve told Owen that I’m leaving him nothing in my will. No money. No property. Nothing he could sell. He agreed. He agreed before I’d even finished the sentence. He said he didn’t want anything from me. I believed him then and I believe him now.” She looked down at the ring on her finger. “In fourteen months in this building, my children have visited me twice. Both times they brought legal paperwork. Owen has visited me every night for eleven months. He’s never brought me anything except books.”
She looked back up into the camera. Her gray eyes. Her teacher’s look.
“Philip. Gwendolyn. I know you’re watching this. I know you’ve told people he’s a con man. I know you’ve said I was confused. I know you’ve hired lawyers. I know, because I raised you, and I know exactly what you’ll do when you’re afraid.”
She paused.
“I’m not angry with you. I want you to know that. I’m sad. I’m sad that you never visited. I’m sad that you only ever wanted to talk about my house. I’m sad that I’ll die without knowing you as grown people, because you never let me.” Her voice shook just a little. “But I’m not angry. You’re getting everything. The house. The investments. Your father’s pension. All of it. Split down the middle, the way it’s always been. Nothing’s changed.”
She leaned forward.
“So here’s the only thing I’m going to ask of you. The only thing. Leave that boy alone. He’s twenty-two. He has nothing. He grew up in five foster homes. He’s going to be a nurse, a very good one, and he’s the kindest person I’ve ever known. If you take that from him to protect your pride, I want you to know that I’ll know. I don’t care where I am. I’ll know.”
She sat back against her pillow.
“That’s all. Leonard, turn it off.”
The screen went dark.
I sat in Leonard Price’s office and couldn’t speak.
“Dr. Lowe’s full report is in the box,” Leonard said quietly. “Signed and notarized. So is Dr. Feldman’s. So is a statement from Dolores. And a statement from Judge Mbeki, who married you, saying he spent twenty minutes alone with Eleanor before the ceremony and she was, quote, sharper than any attorney who’s ever stood in my courtroom.” He paused. “I’ll be filing all of it with the probate court tomorrow morning. And copies with the Ohio Board of Nursing.”
“She planned this,” I said slowly. “All of it. In May. Before we were even married.”
“She planned everything,” Leonard said. “She was the most stubborn woman I’ve ever known. She failed me in tenth grade, you know. Best thing that ever happened to me.” He smiled a little. “She knew exactly what they’d do, Mr. Carter. So she made sure you’d have the truth. In writing. On video. Signed by doctors. That’s what she left you. Not money. The truth. So nobody could ever take it away from you.”
He reached back into the box.
“There’s more,” he said. “The books.”
There were six of them. Her own copies. Middlemarch. Persuasion. East of Eden. Jane Eyre. The Great Gatsby. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Old paperbacks, spines broken, pages soft from rereading. Inside each one, on the first page, in her handwriting:
Given to Owen Carter, May 12. A gift during my lifetime. Not part of my estate. —E.R.W.
I opened Middlemarch. The margins were full of notes. Not from me. From her. In pencil. Fifty years of notes. From when she was nineteen at Ohio State. From when she was thirty and teaching it for the first time. From when she was sixty-nine and listening to me read it.
On the last page, under the last line, the one about people who live quiet lives, she’d written in pencil, very shakily:
O. read this to me Aug. 29. I cried. He pretended not to notice. He always pretends not to notice. It’s the kindest thing about him.
I closed the book and held it against my chest.
“And now,” said Leonard Price, standing up and getting his coat off the hook behind the door, “we have to go get Dickens. Mildred’s moving to her daughter’s in Indiana on Friday, and she’s been very patient.”
“Who’s Mildred? Who’s Dickens?”
“Mildred Pruett was Eleanor’s next-door neighbor for forty-one years,” said Leonard. “And Dickens is a tortoise.”
I stared at him.
“A tortoise,” I said.
“A Russian tortoise,” said Leonard, putting on his coat. “Eleanor’s father bought him at a pet store in Dayton in 1957. The day she was born. As a present. He was about five years old at the time, they think. He’s almost seventy-four years old now. He’s been living in Mildred’s sunroom since Eleanor went into Willowbrook. Philip wanted to take him to the county animal shelter. Mildred wouldn’t let him.”
“Eleanor never told me she had a tortoise.”
“She didn’t tell anybody,” Leonard said. “She told me she was saving him for last. She said you’d need something to take care of. She said you’d be lost without someone to take care of.” He paused at the door. “She also said, and I’m quoting, ‘He’ll probably outlive Owen too. Tortoises outlive everybody. But at least somebody who loved me will be loving him.’”
Mildred Pruett was ninety-one and five feet tall and lived in a yellow house on Elm Street, next door to a gray house with a FOR SALE sign in the yard.
Eleanor’s house.
I’d never been there. I stood on the sidewalk and looked at it for a long time. The porch where she must have sat. The window where she must have read. The garden, overgrown now, with dead tomato vines in it.
Mildred opened her front door before we knocked.
“You’re Owen,” she said. She looked me up and down. “She said you’d be skinny. She was right.”
She took us through her house to the sunroom in the back. It was warm and bright and full of plants. And in the corner, in a big wooden box lined with hay, under a heat lamp, was a tortoise.
He was about the size of a dinner plate. Brown and gold, with a domed shell worn smooth on top. He was eating a piece of lettuce very slowly. When we came in, he stopped and looked up at me. He had small dark eyes and a face like a very old, very patient man.
“That’s Dickens,” said Mildred. “Named after the author. Ellie named him herself when she was six. She said he looked like he had a lot of stories.”
I knelt down by the box.
Dickens looked at me for a long time. Then he went back to his lettuce.
“He doesn’t do much,” Mildred said. “Eats. Sleeps. Walks around the garden in the summer. Hibernates in the winter. Ellie used to read to him. Out on the back porch. When the kids were little and Robert was at work and she had nobody else to talk to.” Mildred’s voice softened. “I’d hear her through the fence. Reading Jane Austen to a tortoise.”
I put my hand down slowly into the box. Dickens looked at it. Then he stretched out his long wrinkled neck and sniffed my fingers.
“He likes you,” said Mildred. “He bit Philip.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was the first time I’d laughed in a month.
“There’s a list,” said Mildred. She handed me an index card. “She wrote it. In June. What he eats. Dandelion greens. Romaine. No iceberg. Squash in the fall. A cuttlebone for calcium. Warm bath once a week. Hibernation box in the garage starting in November. She was very particular.”
I looked at the card. Her handwriting. Shakier than the letter. At the bottom, she’d written:
He likes being read to. He prefers Austen. Don’t let anybody tell you that’s silly.
I carried Dickens out to my car in a cardboard box that said BANANAS on the side. He weighed about six pounds. He scratched at the cardboard once and then settled down.
Before I left, Mildred stood on her front step and held my hand for a moment in both of hers.
“I knew her for forty-one years,” she said. “Through Robert. Through those children. Through all of it.” She squeezed my hand. “The last time I visited her at that place, in August, she was happier than I’d ever seen her. In forty-one years, Owen. Happier than her wedding day to Robert. Happier than when the babies were born.” Her eyes were wet. “Whatever people in this town are saying about you. I want you to know that. She was happy.”
I drove home with a seventy-four-year-old tortoise in a banana box on the passenger seat and the Haribo ring in my shirt pocket and six paperbacks on the floor.
I didn’t turn on the radio. I just drove.
The hearing was on October twentieth, in the Harlan County Probate Court, a small wood-paneled room on the second floor of the courthouse.
I wore my only suit. It was too big in the shoulders. I’d bought it at a thrift store for my foster brother’s funeral four years earlier.
Priya from the legal clinic came with me. So did Leonard Price, in his bow tie. Dolores came, and Dr. Lowe drove up from Dayton, and Judge Mbeki, retired, sat in the back row with his cane across his knees.
Philip and Gwen sat at the other table with their lawyer, a slick man from Columbus with very white teeth. Philip didn’t look at me. Gwen did. Once. Then she looked down at the table.
Their lawyer went first. He used the words I’d been hearing for a month. Vulnerable. Terminal. Morphine. Exploitation. Coercion. Predator. He talked about the age difference. He talked about my job as her aide. He said a twenty-two-year-old care worker with no money and no family had seen a lonely, dying, wealthy woman and done what predators do.
Then Leonard Price stood up.
He didn’t make a speech. He handed the judge a stack of documents. Dr. Lowe’s evaluation. Dr. Feldman’s letter. Dolores’s statement. Judge Mbeki’s statement. My waiver of the elective share, filed five weeks earlier.
“Your Honor,” he said. “Mrs. Whitlock anticipated this hearing. She asked that the court view a short recording she made in May. Before the marriage. In the presence of her physician, her psychiatrist, her nurse, and her attorney.”
The judge, a gray-haired woman named Judge Constance Beale, looked at the documents for a long time.
“I’ll allow it,” she said.
They rolled in a television on a cart. Leonard put in the DVD.
And there was Eleanor. In her blue cardigan. In room 312. With the gummy ring on her finger.
My name is Eleanor Ruth Whitlock.
I watched Philip’s face while it played. It went from angry to pale to something I can’t describe. Gwen had her hand over her mouth from the first sentence.
When Eleanor said, in fourteen months in this building, my children have visited me twice, Gwen made a sound like she’d been hit.
When Eleanor said, he grew up in five foster homes, Philip closed his eyes.
And when Eleanor leaned toward the camera and said, leave that boy alone, Gwen started to cry. Not quietly. Hard. Shoulders shaking. Her lawyer put a hand on her arm. She shook it off.
When the screen went dark, nobody in the courtroom said anything for a long time.
Judge Beale took off her glasses. She folded them very carefully and set them on the bench.
“Mr. Whitlock,” she said. “Mrs. Lindqvist.” That was Gwen’s married name. “Do you wish to proceed with your petition?”
Philip opened his mouth.
Gwen stood up.
“No,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “No, Your Honor. We withdraw it.” She turned to her brother. “Phil. We’re withdrawing it.”
“Gwen…”
“She said leave him alone.” Gwen was crying so hard she could barely talk. “She asked us for one thing. One thing, Phil. In fourteen months. She never asked us for anything. And we couldn’t even…” She stopped. She put her face in her hands.
Philip sat at the table for a long time. He looked at the dark television screen. He looked at the stack of documents on the judge’s bench.
Then he looked at me. For the first time. Really looked.
I didn’t look away.
“We withdraw the petition,” Philip said finally, to the judge. His voice was flat. “And the complaint to the nursing board.”
Judge Beale nodded slowly.
“So noted,” she said. “The petition is dismissed with prejudice. And Mr. Whitlock.” She looked at him over the bench. “I knew your mother. I was in her American Literature class in 1979. She made me rewrite my paper on The Scarlet Letter four times.” She paused. “I’d recommend you go home and watch that recording again. By yourself. Several times.”
After the hearing, in the hallway outside the courtroom, Gwen came up to me.
Philip had already left. He’d walked out without a word and gone straight down the stairs.
Gwen stood in front of me in the hallway with her mascara running down her face.
“I said a terrible thing to you,” she said. “At the funeral. By the coffee.”
“I remember.”
“I’m sorry.” She swallowed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. If you were real, then…” She stopped. “Then it meant we’d left her alone for nothing. And that somebody else had been there instead. A stranger. A kid. And I couldn’t…”
“I know,” I said.
She looked at me. “Was she happy? Really?”
I thought about Mildred on her front step. About the gummy ring. About Mr. Kowalski shouting WHAT? at the wedding. About Eleanor laughing so hard she had to hold her side.
“Yes,” I said. “She was really happy.”
Gwen nodded. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“She used to read to us,” she said. “When we were little. Every night. Before Dad came home. Phil and me on the couch on either side of her. She did all the voices.” Her chin trembled. “I’d forgotten. Until I watched that video. I’d forgotten she used to read to us.”
“She read to a tortoise too,” I said. “Out on the back porch.”
Gwen stared at me. Then she laughed, a wet, surprised laugh.
“Dickens,” she said. “Oh my God. Dickens. Is he alive?”
“He’s in my apartment,” I said. “Eating romaine. She left him to me.”
Gwen put her hand over her mouth. She laughed and cried at the same time.
“Of course she did,” she said. “Of course she did.”
It’s been eight months now.
The Ohio Board of Nursing closed its inquiry in November. Their letter said there was “no evidence of misconduct” and that the relationship had been “entered into freely by a competent adult with full disclosure.” I graduated from the nursing program in May. I passed my boards in June. I start at the hospital in Dayton next month. Oncology unit.
Dr. Feldman wrote me a letter of recommendation. It was two paragraphs long. The second paragraph just said: He reads to his patients. I’ve never seen anyone else do that. Hire him.
People in Harlan still talk. Some of them, anyway. A woman at the gas station still won’t make eye contact. But others have come up to me. More than I expected. Former students of Eleanor’s, mostly. A man who owns the hardware store under my apartment came up the stairs one evening in December with a bag of dandelion greens for Dickens. He said Mrs. Whitlock had failed him in tenth grade and it was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Leonard Price had the same story. So did Judge Beale. So did half the town, it turns out. Eleanor Whitlock failed half of Harlan and they all turned out better for it.
Philip hasn’t spoken to me. I don’t expect him to. Leonard told me he sold Eleanor’s house in March and split the money with Gwen exactly down the middle, the way it said in the will. He said Philip watched the video four more times before the sale went through. I don’t know what that means. Maybe nothing.
Gwen writes to me. Not often. Once every month or two. Real letters, in envelopes, with stamps. She tells me about her kids. Her daughter is reading Jane Eyre for school. Gwen says she’s reading it with her at night. Out loud. Doing the voices.
In April, she drove up from Cincinnati with her kids to meet Dickens. Her daughter, who’s ten, sat on my apartment floor for an hour with the tortoise in her lap, completely silent, stroking his shell.
“He’s really seventy-four?” she whispered finally.
“Almost seventy-five,” I said.
“That’s older than Grandma was.”
“Yes.”
She looked down at him. “Did he know her? Like, really know her?”
“Since the day she was born,” I said. “She used to read to him.”
The girl thought about that for a long time. Then she said, “Can I read to him? Is that weird?”
Gwen made a small sound by the window. I didn’t look at her. I knew she was crying.
“It’s not weird,” I said. “He prefers Austen.”
Dickens hibernated from November to March in a box in my closet, with a thermometer and a blanket. Then he woke up in the spring, slow and grumpy, and ate an entire butternut squash in two days. Now it’s summer. On warm evenings I carry him down to the little patch of grass behind the hardware store, and he walks around very slowly in the clover, and I sit on an upturned bucket and read to him.
We started Persuasion again. The one we didn’t finish. The one Eleanor threw at the wall.
Last night, I finished it.
The last chapter. The one where they get their second chance. Where everybody’s been wrong about everybody, and the two people who were told they couldn’t have each other find out they never stopped being right.
I read the last line out loud to a seventy-five-year-old tortoise in a patch of clover behind a hardware store in Harlan, Ohio, with the sun going down orange over the parking lot.
Dickens stopped eating. He lifted his old wrinkled head and looked at me with his small dark eyes, the way he does sometimes, like he understands every word.
I closed the book.
I took the Haribo ring out of my shirt pocket. I carry it with me every day. It’s hard as glass now. Pale pink. The green jewel faded to the color of sea glass. It’ll probably outlast me. It’ll probably outlast everybody. Like the tortoise.
I held it up to the last of the light.
Eleanor told me once that I didn’t trust happy endings because I hadn’t had enough life to know what was real.
She was right.
I know now.
Some people leave you money. Some people leave you a house. Eleanor left me a tortoise, six paperbacks, a candy ring, and the truth, signed and notarized, so that nobody could ever take it away from me.
And she left me something else. Something she never put in writing.
She left me the knowledge that I was worth loving. By someone who’d read every book there was. Who’d failed half a town and made them better for it. Who’d waited sixty-eight years for someone to ask her what she thought, and when I finally did, decided I was worth her last six months.
Not a cent. Exactly like she promised.
I put the ring back in my pocket. I picked up Dickens, who complained about it, and carried him back upstairs.
Then I opened Middlemarch to the first page. To the beginning.
Her pencil notes were all there in the margins, waiting.
I started reading.
