Mildred Charlotte Wilson's Arc

Chapter 44 of 12

They drove two hours before the first town appeared. Mildred pulled into a lot beside a gas station and shut off the engine. The bank was still far. But the grandfather's letter sat in her coat, folded next to the release document, and she could not leave it there any longer. She had carried it a full day without breaking the seal herself. Tessa slept in the back. The aunt dozed against the window. Mildred drew the letter out and stared at the red crown pressed into the wax. She knew the caretaker had read one letter aloud already. This was a second, meant only for his grandchildren. Her hand shook against the paper. She thought of the money waiting in the bank town. She thought of the man who cast out her mother at seventeen and left her family to rot. If the letter proved him cruel to the end, she was not sure she wanted a single coin of his. Mildred slid her thumb under the wax and cracked it open. The hand was old and careful. He wrote that the money in the bank was never really his. It had been his daughter's dowry, saved before he threw her out. He had kept it locked for thirty-five years, unable to spend it or return it. He asked Mildred and Tessa to take it, not as his gift, but as what he had stolen from their mother and never gave back. Mildred read it twice. The paper trembled in the morning light. This was not a bribe from a proud dead man. It was money that should have gone to her mother, the mother who died poor in a hospital bed while he sat on it. Anger and grief pushed up her throat at once. Tessa stirred and leaned forward. "What is it?" Mildred passed the letter back without a word. Tessa read it, and her eyes filled. The aunt woke and took it next. When she finished, she pressed it to her chest. "It was hers," the aunt whispered. "He saved it for her wedding. She never got one." Mildred started the engine. The question that had gnawed at her was answered now. She did want the money. Not because it was his, but because it had always belonged to her mother. Claiming it was not greed. It was the last thing her mother was owed. "We take every cent," Mildred said. "For her." She folded the letter flat beside the release document and pulled back onto the road. The bank opened at nine. Both signatures, the clerk had said, and nothing less. Mildred meant to give them exactly that.