My Grandmother Left Me Her Vermont Maple Farm. My Cousin’s Lawyer Came to Take It Away, and Fell in Love With It Instead

I walked her through the sugarbush for two hours.

I showed her the tubing lines running through the trees, the old sap buckets my grandmother still insisted on hanging along the road, the sugarhouse with steam pouring out of the cupola.

Callie took notes and photographs. She asked careful lawyer questions. How many hours a week did my grandmother work? Did she handle her own finances? Did she understand the value of her estate?

“She knew the price of syrup to the penny,” I said. “She did her own taxes until she was eighty-eight. She fired her financial advisor at ninety because he ‘talked to her like she was a child.'”

Callie almost smiled.

Inside the sugarhouse, the evaporator was roaring. The air was thick with sweet steam. I handed her a little paper cup of warm syrup straight off the pan.

She tasted it and closed her eyes.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “That’s not fair.”

I laughed.

Then she opened her eyes, and her face changed.

“Mr. Gallagher,” she said. “I need to ask you something that I shouldn’t ask. Off the record.”

“Okay.”

“Did your grandmother leave anything in writing? Besides the will? Letters, a diary, anything?”

I hesitated.

“There’s a box,” I said. “In her bedroom. I haven’t been able to open it.”