The Final Clause
The summons arrived on a Tuesday, three weeks and two days after Curtis walked me to the security desk and watched from the landing while two men in gray uniforms carried my bags to the curb.
It was not a dramatic document. It was a standard legal notice from an estate attorney’s office, informing Vanessa Webb that she was required to appear at the reading of the final will and testament of Arthur Webb Sr., per the specific instruction of the deceased, at ten o’clock on the fifteenth.
I read it three times.
I had not been at the original reading. Curtis had told me there was no reason for me to attend. He had told me this on the same day that he told me I was excess baggage, and I had been sufficiently undone by that conversation that I had not thought to question the first statement. I had been at the attorney’s office three days later signing divorce papers that Curtis had had prepared with impressive efficiency. The attorney for the divorce was a different firm. Curtis had planned ahead.
The summons was from a third firm I did not recognize.
I called the number at the bottom.
The woman who answered was brisk and efficient and confirmed that yes, I was required to attend, yes it was the estate of Arthur Webb Sr., and no, she could not tell me why or what the content of the reading would include.
I was living in a studio apartment that I had moved into eight days earlier. It was the cheapest thing I could find within commuting distance of the city. The bathroom had a crack in the ceiling that I had decided not to think about. The kitchen had two burners. I had furnished it from a secondhand shop and from things I had been given by a friend named Margot who had heard from a mutual acquaintance what had happened and who had appeared at my car window outside the grocery store on the third night with a sleeping bag and a thermos of soup and who was now the person I trusted most in the world.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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