mind and purpose, do hereby swear a sacred oath to accept and discharge all obligations, tangible and intangible, related to the post of luthier.
An unusual phrasing. Something in her belly objects. The walls seem to be closing in, and she pushes the paper away. “Why now? If you want me to have it, can’t you just leave it to me in a will?”
“Wills take forever to execute. Besides, why wait? After I die, you’ll feel like you should be grieving. Now you can sign the papers with joyful enthusiasm.”
“And Dad?”
“What about him?”
“This would be a bit of a shocker for him, don’t you think?” Phee’s father is tone deaf and not musically inclined, but she knows full well that as the only son he expects to inherit the full estate.
“Your father will receive a financial bequest. But he would just sell the business to some stranger. I can’t have that. I need you to carry on the MacPhee name.”
Everything Granddad says sounds logical enough, but her father isn’t going to see it that way. Besides the money aspect, he’s dead set on Phee going to college and getting some kind of useful degree. What that would be, since she has no interest in anything other than music and instruments, is a frequent dinnertime debate. But he won’t be at all happy about her taking over the luthier business.
“Would I move in with you, then?” she asks, half dizzy with possibilities. “Live here? And what’s the ‘intangible’ part all about? I don’t understand.”
Her grandfather rolls his eyes. “What is it with young people today? My generation didn’t think so much.”
Phee glares at him, and his face sobers.
“I’m dying, Phee.”
“Not now. Not yet.” She shoves the papers away. “Not for a long time.”
“Cancer.” He lays the single word out on the table with the papers, and all three of them stare at its ugliness. Granddad with a resigned twist of humor. The lawyer as if she’s seen it so many times it doesn’t shock her. Phee with the terror of the untried young.
“Oh my God! Do Dad and Mom know?”
“Nobody knows. This is between me, you, and the doctors. Well, and Angela, of course.”
“But, Granddad! You’ll need help. We can—”
“The only help I need, Ophelia MacPhee, is for you to sign these papers and promise that you will accept the responsibility for all of my obligations.”
Phee can’t breathe. The pen seems exaggerated in size, a weight her slight fingers will never be able to manage. The old man lays a hand over hers. So thin, the skin so transparent she can see the tracery of blue veins beneath. How did she not notice? How did none of them notice he’d been ill?
“Who is to do this thing, if not you?” he asks her.
“You could try a different doctor. Radiation, chemo. There has to be something.”
He shakes his head, more in impatience than sadness. “It’s in my liver. In my bones. I’m an old man, on borrowed time already. There can be no waiting. Sign it, Phee. Say that you will be responsible for everything when I am no longer here.”
“I go on record as saying I recommend you wait,” the attorney says. But she makes no move to intervene.
Phee looks up at her grandfather. “You’ll be here, to help?”
“Always. Dead or alive.”
She doesn’t understand her own resistance. He will die, whether she signs or not. He wants her to have the shop, and she wants to own it, wants to be a luthier.
Still, her fingers tremble as she signs.
It’s on the last stroke of the pen, the upsweep at the end of the final e in MacPhee, that she first hears the music. A deep, sonorous tone, long held. It startles her so that she drops the pen. Her eyes meet her grandfather’s, and she reads sorrowful awareness there. The attorney, not missing a beat, signs her own name on the document below the spidery signature that is her grandfather’s trademark.
“I’ll be going, then.” The attorney lifts her barely touched glass and drains the whiskey like a gunslinger in a Western. She slams the glass down on the table and glares at her client.
“I should hate you for making me do this.”
“But you don’t. Goodbye, Angela.” He reaches for her hand and kisses it.
“Go well, old man.”
It’s an odd way to say goodbye, but Phee lets it pass, not glancing away from her grandfather as the woman leaves.