The Inheritance, part 2

Read part 1 here.

“You might want to Scotchgard that white jacket while you’re here,” Arden mutters.

Tate is seven years older than Arden, but they could pass for twins. Tate is the glamorous, successful sister. She’s an editor at a home décor magazine and lives with her boyfriend, Tanvir, in a sleek Yorkville condo overlooking Bloor Street. No debt, no mortgage, no kids.

“This old thing?” Tate teases, taking off her shearling jacket and tossing it on the back of Ali’s chair.

“Here’s the map to their school,” Arden says. “And to their swimming lessons.”

“The map? Isn’t the school around the corner? Don’t the kids know where they’re going?”

“It’s just in case.” Arden hands her a thick document. “These are some instructions, some phone numbers. And here are the meds.”

She opens the pantry door above the coffee machine and starts pull- ing out all the colored pill bottles. “This is Wyatt’s Biphentin. He takes one with breakfast.” WYATT is written in black Sharpie on the lid. “If you forget to give it to him, you’ll probably get a call from his teacher.”

“Got it.”

“These are for Ivey,” she says. “She gets one Vyvanse and one Zoloft. She has to take them with food. She hasn’t been eating lately so you have to force her to have some toast at least, or the Vyvanse won’t work.”

“The Vyvanse is for the anxiety?”

“No, for the ADHD. The Zoloft is for the anxiety. She can forget to take a Vyvanse, but she has to take her Zoloft.”

“What about this one?”

“This is my Prozac. I’ll be taking it with me. Ivey sometimes takes a Dexedrine after school if she has a lot of homework and she needs some extra focus, but maybe don’t give it to her while I’m gone. Sometimes it gives her heart palpitations and the last thing you want is for her to have one of her panic attacks and wind up at the hospital.”

“Holy shit, you need a pharmacist, not a babysitter.”
“This is the new world,” Arden says.
“What about friends?”
“Only Tyler’s mother keeps a completely peanut-free house for Wyatt.”

 ”So he can go to Tyler’s?”

“Yes, but that’s it. Otherwise, you’d have to call whoever’s mother

beforehand and tell her exactly what to do and it’s a big pain in the ass—” Wyatt’s brow furrows. Arden quickly puts her arm around him and crouches down to talk to him at eye level. “I shouldn’t have said that, Magpie. I just meant it’s a lot of trouble for Aunt Tate to explain to your friends’ moms—”

“You think I’m a pain in the ass.”

“No, I don’t,” she says. “Now, go put your shoes on or you’ll be late for school.”

“What else do I need to know?” Tate asks, skimming the documents.

“Wyatt’s been having nightmares. I stupidly had a Holocaust doc- umentary on while he was in the room. I didn’t realize he was paying attention. If it’s a bad one, just give him his iPad till he falls asleep.”

“Can I give him a Zoloft?”

Arden looks at her, not sure if she’s kidding. You can never tell with nonparents. “No, you can’t give him a Zoloft.”

“What about screen time?”

“The twins get an hour after dinner. Ivey only after all her homework is done.”

“Ah yes, I see that here in your four-hundred-page tome.”
“I’d be happy to stay home and let you go to New York in my place.” “It’s been over a year,” Tate says. “You need this. And so do they.” 

The phone rings before Arden has a chance to argue. She hunts around for it, silently cursing whichever kid—because it’s always a kid— carelessly misplaced it. She finally finds it on the built-in desk in the butler’s pantry, buried under the Globe and Mail.

“Hello?”

“Arden Moore?”
“Yes.”
“This is Larry Lasker. I’m the estate lawyer—”
“My husband’s estate has already been settled,” Arden interrupts. “It was settled right after he died.”

“Actually, I’m calling from Westchester County, New York.”
Arden drops into the Gobi barstool, suddenly placing his name. Uncle Larry.

“I represented your mother many years ago in the Ashforth hearings.”

“Of course,” she manages, and it all comes back at once, a deluge of confusion and pain.

“I knew you when you were a little girl,” he says, and of course she remembers driving around in his navy blue Corvette, eating Dunkin’ Donuts and singing along to the Everly Brothers. There was no back seat in that car, so her mother and Uncle Larry used to squeeze her into the crawl space whenever they had to drive between Rye and Manhattan.

She loved it at first, until those donuts and fun rides led to the ruin of her snug little life in Brooklyn.

“The petitions were over your right to inherit from your father’s estate,” he reminds her.

“That was a long time ago. We’ve all moved on.”

“I’ve been following another, related estate case in the Surrogate’s Court,” he explains. “I was waiting on that verdict before reaching out to you. The decision just came in and I thought you might be interested. It affects you a great deal, Arden.”

The way he calls her by her first name makes it seem like they’re old friends. She’s not eight anymore; he can’t win her over with donuts. “I can’t do this,” she says.

“Arden—”

“It’s been over for a long time, Mr. Lasker. My mother gave it all she had, and she lost. It cost us a great deal, and I won’t make that same mistake.”

“This time it has to do with Bruce Ashforth,” he says. “Your half brother. You may or may not know he died?”

A caterpillar of excitement crawls up the back of her neck.

“Can I at least give you my number?” Lasker says. “I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say. You know how much money is at stake.”

“How much exactly?”

“They’re estimating Bruce’s estate to be worth about sixty million, which would put your share at thirty, give or take.”

She sputters something, an attempt to speak that fails and comes out sounding like a burp.

“Give me your number,” Arden says. “I’m actually on my way to New York right now. I could meet with you Sunday before I fly home?”

She reaches for a pen and scribbles his number on the corner of the newspaper.

“I look forward to seeing you again,” he says.

“Are you coming?” Tate says, barging into the butler’s pantry. “The Uber driver is about to leave.”

“Mom’s old lawyer just called me. Remember Larry Lasker? The short guy with the perm and the Village People moustache?”

“Yeah, of course. The one with the donuts.”
“He just called,” Arden says. “He wants to talk to me about the Ashforth inheritance again.” “Why now?”

“It has to do with my half-brother, Bruce’s, death. Apparently, I may be able to inherit from him.”

Tate sighs unhappily. Arden can’t blame her; they all have terrible memories from their mother’s legal crusade against the Ashforths.

“It’s thirty million dollars,” Arden adds, and Tate’s expression changes.

“So here we go again,” Arden says, and they stare at each other in silence, understanding perfectly, without having to say a word, the full implication of what that means.

---

The first picture Arden ever saw of her father fell out of one of her mother’s books, The Sensuous Woman, when she was six. They were packing to move from their basement apartment in Astoria to the house in Brooklyn that belonged to her mother’s boyfriend, Hal. It was very hot that day. Today in New York was announcing ninety-four degrees for the second day in a row. There was a noisy fan oscillating slowly, like an old man hav- ing trouble breathing. The fan was sitting on a plastic folding chair their mother had dragged into the middle of the room. Arden was scooping books from the bookcase and dumping them into file boxes. Her mother wasn’t a big reader—in fact, Arden had never seen her mother read any- thing before, although it’s possible she read after Arden went to sleep—but she was very attached to the books she did have. She had given Arden very specific instructions about which books went into which boxes. The boxes were labeled “Sexuality,” “Diet,” and “Self-Help.” Arden had to figure out which ones went where. Some were more obvious than others—The Com- plete Scarsdale Medical Diet, The Save Your Life Diet, The Beverly Hills Diet, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, The Joy of Sex, The Sensuous Woman.

Arden stopped to flip through The Sensuous Woman, which is when the photograph fell into her lap. She gazed it for a moment, sitting there on her bare thigh, and she knew it was her father. The date at the bottom said July 1979.

“Is this our dad?” she asked her mother, holding up the picture.

Virginia was in the kitchenette, wrapping dishes in newspaper. She stopped what she was doing and lowered Phil Donahue on her little ten- inch TV. “Where did you find that?”

“In this book,” Arden said, holding it up.

Virginia threw her head back and laughed. “Isn’t moving fun?” she said. “All the things you find!”

“So, he is our dad?” Arden asked again, studying the man in the pic- ture. He had a dark suntan and deep creases fanning out around eyes, which were squinting into the sun. He was on a boat, wearing a blue windbreaker and white pants. A pair of sunglasses was perched on his head, tamping down his windblown white hair.

“That’s him,” Virginia said, climbing over some boxes to get to her. “I forgot about that picture.”

“He’s so old.”
“He was handsome, though. You had to see him in person.”
“How did he die?” She never thought to ask until now.
“He died in a plane crash,” her mother said. “When I was pregnant with you.”
“It was his own plane,” Tate added, coming out of her bedroom. She was wearing her boxer shorts, the ones that said RAD on the bottom and a cropped Madonna T-shirt from the Who’s That Girl concert in July. Tate and Virginia had had a huge fight about it because the T-shirt had cost a fortune and Tate went and cut it up, so that now it showed off a strip of her stomach. She had grown tall and skinny over the summer. She was almost fourteen, and their mother kept saying, “Things are about to get interesting around here.”

“He was one of the richest men in America,” Tate said.
“He was?”
“She’s exaggerating,” Virginia said. “He was nowhere near one of the richest men in America.”
“He was a billionaire,” Tate said.
“He was not a billionaire,” Virginia corrected, starting to sound exasperated. “He probably had a hundred million or so, yes, that’s true. But a billion dollars is a thousand million, and Wallace did not have that much.”

“Sorryyyy,” Tate said. “I stand corrected. He was a hundred million- aire then.” She was leaning against the bookcase with her usual surly expression. Looking to cause trouble, Virginia used to say.”Our dad was really a hundred millionaire?” Arden said, turning to her mother.

“He wasn’t our dad,” Tate corrected her matter-of-factly. “Uncle Wally was your dad. We don’t have the same father.”

Virginia’s head twisted around like a Barbie doll’s.

“We’re not sisters?” Arden cried, and the world as she knew it col- lapsed around her, leaving her sitting there among her mother’s sex books and the rubble of her formerly safe universe.

“We’re half sisters,” Tate said. “We have the same mother, but differ- ent fathers. Your father was, like, the richest man in the America, and mine was the poorest.”

“For God’s sake, Tate.”
Arden began to cry.
Tate looked stricken and rushed over to her. “We’re still sisters,” she

said, pulling Arden into her arms. “Having the same mother basically makes us real sisters.”

“Why do you have to be so mean?” Virginia said to Tate. “She didn’t need to know that today.”

Tate rolled her eyes. She was angry because she didn’t want to go live with Uncle Hal, who was going to marry their mother in the fall. She wanted to stay in their little apartment, just the three of them. Arden understood that Tate had meant to hurt their mother, not her, but it still felt like Tate had kicked her in the stomach.

“Why don’t Tate and I have the same father?” she asked her mother.

“Because I loved two men,” Virginia explained. Tate rolled her eyes again.

Arden couldn’t explain what exactly she felt she’d lost—her sister? Her father? Her mother? Probably all of them. Or maybe it was the idea of her mother, who was no longer perfect and solid and trustworthy in her eyes, but somehow smudged, like an ink blob on a beautiful draw- ing. What if her mother had another baby with Uncle Hal? There would be three of them, connected by one mother and yet fundamentally dis- connected, with fathers scattered everywhere.

“You also have two brothers,” Tate said.

Arden looked over at her mother. Virginia was glaring at Tate. “Is that true?”

“Yes, hon. Two half brothers.” “Can I play with them?”

“They’re grown-ups,” Tate chimed in. “They’re Mom’s age.”

“A few years younger than me,” Virginia said. “They’d be in their twenties now.”

“Why don’t we ever see them?”

“They hate Mom,” Tate said. “They think she’s a gold digger, so they act like you don’t exist.”

“Oh, Tate!” Virginia cried. “Stop it now. Just stop it.”

Virginia took both of Arden’s hands in her own and said, “One day, you will get your share of the Ashforth fortune.”

“Arden’s going to be a billionaire?” Tate cried.

“Wallace Ashforth was your father,” Virginia said, ignoring Tate. “And no matter what your half brothers say or do, I will never stop fight- ing for what belongs to you, Arden. Do you hear me?”

Arden nodded, confused.

“Now, I can put this picture in a frame for you if you like,” Virginia said, making her voice sound light and bubbly. “And you can keep it in your new room.”

Arden nodded again, not sure why it mattered. She felt nothing at all for the old man in the photograph, but she did latch onto the good parts of the story and embellish them. A couple of years later, when she was in third grade at her new school in Midwood, she told her classmates her father had been the richest man in the world. No one believed her, though. They knew she lived in a small house on Avenue K, no different from the rest of them. When she asked her mother about this, Virginia said, “Your father didn’t have a will, which is why you got nothing. But one day you’ll get everything you deserve.”

Arden’s teacher, Mrs. Rosenstern, kept Arden after school one day and told her to stop talking about how rich her dead father was. She said that no one liked a braggart. Arden thought the word “braggart” was hilarious. She had no intention of stopping; the bragging was all she had. But then one day she made some comment about her father being Wallace Ashforth, the millionaire. Normally the other kids just ignored her, but this time, someone from her class—a popular girl named Carrie Stein—took a few steps closer to her. They were in the schoolyard for re- cess, playing dodgeball. Carrie was holding the red dimpled ball against her chest. She was wearing a black Monsters of Rock T-shirt and had a scary look on her face. The other kids from the game gathered in closer when she approached Arden. “My mom knows who your mom is,” Carrie said. “Your mom was in the newspaper because she’s a con artist.”

The other kids snickered. Arden remembers their laughing faces floating around her. “She is not,” Arden said, her face getting hot.

“My mom says your mother is a scammer and that you’re a bastard,” Carrie went on. “She says your mom doesn’t have a clue who your real father is and that she’s just using you to get the money. So, stop saying Wallace Ashforth is your father because the truth is you’re nobody.”

That was the last time Arden ever bragged about being an Ashforth.