“It took a little while to locate you,” Ms. Standing told us, “which gave me time to get everything pretty well in order. We’ll just get this paperwork out of the way and then you can go ahead and take possession of your home.”
“Today?” Mom asked.
“Well, not quite that fast, but I’d say by Monday. Where are you staying in the meantime, in case I need to contact you?”
Mom gave her the name of the hotel. She sounded worried. Then Ms. Standing looked at her closely and asked if we were all right for money.
“I guess we can manage for a few days,” Mom said, but her voice was unconvincing. I knew that four nights in a hotel, plus meals, would cost more than what we had left but she didn’t want to admit that.
“Well, let’s just make things a bit simpler.” Ms. Standing pressed a button on her desk and a moment later the receptionist appeared.
“Angela, would you call the Gilmores’ hotel and have them bill their room to my office?” Then she assured Mom it was no problem and she’d just add the cost to her bill.
“Your bill,” Mom echoed, looking very uncomfortable. “Will it be very much?”
“Don’t worry about that.” She smiled. “It will just come off the money that’s been left to you, along with the house.”
“You haven’t clarified that, I mean, how much money is actually involved?”
“Of course, I won’t have an exact figure for you until everything is settled,” Ms. Standing said. She was smiling, which was no wonder since she was about to deliver very good news. “I can tell you, however, that it will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty-seven thousand dollars.”
Mom started to cry.
CHAPTER SIX
Thirty-seven thousand dollars! After all the years of watching every penny, it sounded like a million to us. When we left Ms. Standing’s office we were both practically in shock. We walked slowly along Wellington Street, stopped to admire our house again, and then went back toward the park. Every so far we paused and looked at each other and said that we couldn’t believe it. That wasn’t quite true; we did believe it, but it was going to take a while to totally sink in.
“Are we rich?” I asked as we went by the park.
“Not by a long shot. But it will certainly keep us going until I can find work. Still, we’ll have to be careful with it just the same.”
“Will we get a car?” We’d never had a car and I’d always thought how wonderful it would be to be able to go wherever you wanted whenever you wanted to.
“Yes, we’ll have a car. And you’ll have a computer.”
As we continued walking I couldn’t help thinking that a few weeks ago all of these things would have seemed impossible. We’d managed on so little for so long that it was going to be hard to get used to having things.
“There’s one thing I can’t figure out. Why did Aunt Sarah leave everything to me?” Mom wondered aloud, breaking into my thoughts. “I can’t understand it. There are lots of kin she could have named as her heirs.”
That was kind of puzzling. It’s not as though we were closer to her than the others. We didn’t even know her! I wondered if any of her relatives had ever visited or written to her or anything. Then an idea popped into my head.
“Maybe it’s because she thought I was named after her,” I suggested.
“You could be right. I hadn’t even thought of that. But I guess we’ll never know for sure.”
“Hi gals, how’s she going?” a man’s voice called from across the street.
When we looked over, we saw that the odd greeting had come from Stan, who had pulled his car up to the curb opposite to where we were standing.
“Oh, hello.” Mom gave a little wave.
“I was just driving along when I spied the two of you.” He nodded as if to prove what he was saying was true. “How’d you make out? Did you like what you saw of Chatham?”
“It seems very nice.”
“Good then, great.” More nodding. “If you’re ready to go back to Newcastle, I’m on my way there now.”
Mom hesitated for a second and then told him it would be much appreciated. We crossed the street and climbed into the car. We’d hardly pulled away from the curb when Stan asked a question that surprised us both.
“I guess you must be the pair who’ve inherited old Sarah Wentworth’s place, then, are you?”
“We are,” Mom said in surprise. “How did you know that?”
“Ah, you can’t keep nothing secret around here.”
“Anything,” Mom said automatically. I almost burst out laughing and just kept it in by taking a deep breath and holding it. Mom is so used to correcting my grammar that she sometimes slips and does it with other people too.
“Huh?” Stan had missed her meaning.
“Oh, don’t pay me any mind. I was just thinking out loud.” Mom gave me a warning look that suggested I keep my amusement under control. “Anyway, how was it that you heard we’d inherited my great-aunt’s estate?”
Rather than being embarrassed about admitting that he’d been listening to gossip about us, Stan seemed proud to have gotten the information. He launched into an explanation of how he’d been talking to someone who’d heard it from a neighbour who, in turn, had gotten the news from someone else. It sounded as if all the details of our lives had been passed about and discussed by the whole city. And we’d been there for less than six hours!
“I see,” Mom said coldly. Almost anyone should have been able to tell that she was annoyed to find herself the centre of so much attention from people she didn’t even know. Not Stan, though. He beamed and went on about how he’d put two and two together and concluded that we were the ones moving into the Wentworth house. I thought his pride over it was a bit ridiculous. After all, he’d dropped us off there that morning; it wouldn’t take a towering genius to figure out that we were the folks inheriting the place.
It wasn’t long before he switched from boasting about his powers of deduction to fishing for information. Mom was deliberately vague when she replied to anything he asked and I could see he was disappointed that he wasn’t getting any juicy details about us. I suppose the fact that he’d met us gave him a place of importance among the gossips and he was keen to have something interesting to add to the circulating stories. Well, he didn’t get anything from Mom!
She was obviously relieved to get away from his questions when we got back to the part of Miramichi that locals still called Newcastle. He offered to take us right to wherever we were staying but Mom is too cautious for that. Instead of letting him know what hotel we were at, she told him to drop us off downtown.
“We’ll look around a bit and get some dinner first,” she said casually. “We can walk back to our hotel later on.”
Stan nodded and smiled and recommended The Scoreboard as having good food and reasonable prices. Underneath his parting friendliness, though, I sensed a twinge of annoyance that he wouldn’t even be able to tell people where we were staying. It gave me a feeling of satisfaction to know that he’d completely failed in his quest for information.
“By the way, the last name is Reynolds,” he said as we got out of the car. “I’m in the phone book. You be sure to call if you need anything. Anything at all.”
Mom thanked him for everything and said she’d keep the offer in mind. She sounded so sincere that I’d have believed her if I didn’t know better. There was no way she was ever going to call Stan.