The faded label on Grandma’s cassette held only her name, though everyone else left the lawyer’s office carrying money or jewelry. Then her lawyer shut the door, repeated a warning meant only for me, and sent me home to find a machine that could play whatever she’d kept hidden from us all for years.
“That’s all she left you?”
My cousin was laughing.
I looked at the cassette in my hand.
It was gray, with a faded paper label and PENNY written across one corner.
“That’s all she left you?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
The lawyer cleared his throat.
My grandmother’s apartment had been left to her children. Her jewelry was divided among my cousins, along with several modest financial gifts.
Her jewelry was divided among my cousins.
There was the pearl necklace she wore to church.
The gold bracelet that always caught on her cardigan.
A pair of earrings I remembered her putting on for my grandfather’s birthday dinners.
I hadn’t expected anything expensive.
Still, I’d imagined she might leave me something familiar.
I hadn’t expected anything expensive.
Her recipe box, perhaps.
Or the little clock from her kitchen.
Instead, I had a cassette.
***
“Maybe there’s a secret fortune recorded on it,” my cousin teased.
I slipped the cassette into its envelope.
I had a cassette.
Grandma Penny had been dead for eight days.
I was still waking up on Sunday mornings and reaching for my phone before remembering there was nobody to call.
I didn’t have the energy to defend her choice.
Grandma Penny had been dead for eight days.
When the meeting ended, the lawyer asked me to stay.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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