Chapter 8: Headed East

Probate was slower than grief and faster than peace.

Hale called twice a week with words like letters testamentary and clear title. Judith watched Catalpa and watered the rosemary and left casseroles we pretended to finish. Allie and I lived in the thinning house like squatters with a key: two plates, two towels, the queen in my old room, the rest of the rooms going hollow as boxes left.

We did the Florida work at Dad’s desk.

UF’s site did not care that we were orphans. It cared about transcripts and essays and whether I could explain a withdrawn semester without turning it into theater. I wrote the truth in one paragraph and let it be plain. Allie wrote about leaving a town that still said her name in the grocery store. She did not write about my mouth or the week in Georgetown. She wrote about a sister and a second chance. That was true enough to live on.

I called Hale about buying out of state. He said yes, with patience, with wiring instructions, with a warning not to send earnest money before he said so. I called a Gainesville realtor named Patty who called me hon and did not ask why two California women wanted a three-bedroom with a pool and a fence. I sent her a number we could pay in cash once the estate released it. She sent back six listings. Four were duds. One sat on a flood map. One was a low bungalow northwest of campus: three bedrooms, two baths, screened porch, fenced yard, a pool the color of a cheap postcard and a filter that would need work.

We hired an inspector we would never meet. His report came back with the usual sins — aging water heater, hairline crack in the patio, pool pump on borrowed time — and nothing that would have made Dad walk away. Allie looked at the photos of the empty primary bedroom and said, “That one.”

“We haven’t stood in it.”

“We’ll stand in it. I can already tell it doesn’t smell like her lotion.”