for an early distribution. She told me she needed it to cover some business debts of your father's and a tax obligation, and she told me, when I asked, that you had not started college this fall." Another pause, longer. "Josephine, I'm eighty-one years old and I don't like to do things over the phone. Would you be willing to come see me? I think there are some things you need to know, and I'm afraid nobody in your family knows them yet. I'd like you to hear them first."
* * *
Lorraine Beasley lived in a brick house on Crest Road on Missionary Ridge, with a view down the east side toward Brainerd that she said had cost her husband his entire first decade of practice and had been worth every cent. She met me at the door with a cane in one hand and a manila folder in the other. She was small and very straight, in a gray cardigan, with white hair cut short as a man's, and she looked at me for a long moment on the porch the way Mags looked at bad concrete, listening for the sound.
"You have her chin," she said finally. "God help you. Come in."
She had iced tea ready, and a plate of shortbread nobody touched. We sat at her dining room table and she opened the folder and turned it toward me.
"Your grandmother's will left her house and most of her savings to a trust," she said. "I'm the trustee. The house sold for two hundred and four thousand dollars in the spring after she passed. After expenses, and after three years of fairly conservative investment, the trust is worth about a hundred and forty-eight thousand. Your mother knows the trust exists. She knows it is supposed to pay out to her. She has received a copy of the will and the trust instrument, as the law requires. And I would bet you my house that she never read past the first page."
"Why?"
"Because she was grieving. Because she thought she knew what it said. Because her mother had been telling her for years that she'd be taken care of in the end." Lorraine tapped a paragraph with one finger. Her nail was painted a pale coral. "Read this. Article Four, Section Two."
I read it. I read it twice. I read things.
The Trustee shall distribute the entire remaining principal and income of the trust to my daughter, Denise Pruitt Calder, on the first day of my granddaughter Josephine Idabelle Calder's second academic year of post-secondary education, PROVIDED THAT the education savings account I established for Josephine