And now they had all looked at me and seen labor.
Not Martha. Not daughter. Not sister.
Resource.
On Wednesday, three days after the dinner, I got a text from Colette while I was making coffee between calls.
You’re being selfish. Mom says you’ve always hated seeing me happy.
I stared at the message so long my coffee machine beeped twice. Then another one came in.
Maybe if you had kids, you’d understand what family does for each other.
That sentence scraped against something old. Because family had always been something I did for them. I was the one who visited Grandma Odessa at the care facility when her hands got too shaky to butter toast. I was the one who sat through my father’s silent moods. I was the one who remembered birthdays, brought food, mailed sympathy cards. But in families like mine, the giving only counts when it flows toward the chosen person.
I took screenshots and saved them in a folder I named May.
I did not yet know why I was documenting things. Only that some instinct had finally woken up and wanted proof.
The next day, Thursday, my personal email chimed while I was reviewing outpatient charts. The subject line read: Succession Matter Regarding the Estate of Odessa Pierre.
For a second I thought it was spam.
My grandmother had been dead since November 2019. I knew the date the way some people know the date of an accident they survived. She had died in a care facility in Baton Rouge, quietly in her sleep, after two years of being slowly diminished by a body that stopped obeying her. I had been the one who found out first because I was the one who visited every Tuesday evening with lotion, fruit, and whatever gossip I thought might make her laugh.
After the funeral my mother told me she had “handled the estate.” There had been, according to her, “not much to speak of.” A house in Tremé that needed work. A little savings. Some old furniture nobody wanted. Grief makes you accept explanations you would challenge in daylight.
Now a law office in New Orleans was requesting that I contact them regarding unresolved matters.
My hands went cold.
I opened the email. Marchand & Associates. Formal. Precise. They asked me to schedule a consultation as soon as possible concerning “significant irregularities” in the succession of Odessa Marie Pierre.
