Alone at last in the humid night, Eureka reached inside her cardigan pocket, pulled out the wallet Ander had returned. She looked in the fold and saw a little square of lined notebook paper among her seven dollar bills. He had scrawled in careful black ink:
8
LEGACY
Eureka chewed on her thumbnail, staring at her bobbing knees under the lacquered oak table in the fluorescent-lit boardroom. She’d been dreading this Thursday afternoon since Dad had been summoned to appear at the office of J. Paul Fontenot, Esquire, of Southeast Lafayette.
Diana had never mentioned having a will. Eureka wouldn’t have imagined that her mother and lawyers breathed the same air. But here they were at Diana’s lawyer’s office, gathered to hear the thing read, sandwiched between Diana’s other living relatives—Eureka’s uncle Beau and her aunt Maureen. Eureka had not seen them since the funeral.
The funeral was not a funeral. Her family called it a memorial service, because they hadn’t found Diana’s body yet, but everyone in New Iberia called the hour at St. Peter’s a funeral, either out of respect or ignorance. The boundary was hazy.
Eureka’s face had been cut up then, her wrists in casts, her eardrum blaring from the accident. She didn’t hear a word the priest said, nor did she move from her pew until everyone else had walked past the blown-up photograph of Diana, which was propped on the closed casket. They were going to bury the bodiless casket in the plot Sugar had paid for decades ago. What a waste.
Alone in the emerald-hued sanctuary, Eureka crept toward the photograph, studying the smile lines around Diana’s green eyes as she leaned over a balcony in Greece. Eureka had taken the picture the summer before. Diana was laughing at the goat licking their laundry, which was hanging out to dry in the yard below.
Eureka’s cast-stunted fingers had suddenly gripped the edges of the frame. She’d wanted to want to weep, but she could feel nothing of Diana through the flat, glossy surface of the photograph. Her mother’s soul had flown away. Her body was still in the ocean—bloated, blue, nibbled by fish, haunting Eureka every night.
Eureka stayed there, alone, her hot cheek against the glass, until Dad came in and wrested the frame from her hands. He filled them with his hands and walked her to the car.
“Are you hungry?” he’d asked, because food was how Dad made things okay. The question had nauseated Eureka.
There was no party, like there’d been after the funeral for Sugar, the only other person Eureka had been close to who’d died. When Sugar passed five years earlier, she got a proper New Orleans–style jazz funeral: somber first-line music on the way into the cemetery, then joyous second-line music played on the way to the Sazerac celebration of her life. Eureka remembered the way Diana had held court at Sugar’s funeral, orchestrating toast after toast. She remembered thinking she couldn’t imagine handling Diana’s death with such panache, no matter how old she might be or how peaceful the circumstances.
As it turned out, that didn’t matter. No one wanted to celebrate after Diana’s memorial. Eureka spent the rest of the day alone in her room, staring at the ceiling, wondering when she’d find the energy to move again, having her first truly suicidal thought. It felt like weights pressing down on her, like she couldn’t get enough air.
Three months later, here she was, at the reading of Diana’s will, with no more energy. The boardroom was large and sunny. Thick-paned windows offered views of tasteless loft apartments. Eureka, Dad, Maureen, and Beau sat around one corner of the huge table. Twenty swivel seats sat empty on the other side of the room. No one else was expected but Diana’s lawyer, who was “on a call” when they arrived, according to his secretary. She placed Styrofoam cups of weak coffee in front of the family.
“Oh, honey, your roots!” Aunt Maureen winced across the table from Eureka. She blew into her coffee cup, slurped a sip.
For a moment, Eureka thought Maureen had been referring to her familial roots, the only ones Eureka cared about that day. She supposed the two were connected; the roots damaged by Diana’s death had caused the offensive, grown-out ones on her head.
Maureen was the oldest of the De Ligne children, eight years Diana’s senior. The sisters had shared the same dewy skin and wiry red hair, dimples on their shoulders, green, grainy eyes behind their glasses. Diana had inherited a truck-load more class; Maureen had gotten Sugar’s ample breasts and wore dangerously low-cut blouses to show her heirlooms off. Studying her aunt across the table, Eureka realized that the main difference between the sisters was that Eureka’s mother had been beautiful. You could look at Maureen and see Diana gone wrong. She was a cruel parody.
Eureka’s hair was damp from her shower after her run that afternoon. The team did a six-mile loop through the Evangeline woods on Thursdays, but Eureka did her own solitary loop through the university’s leafy campus.
“I can’t hardly bear to look at you.” Maureen clicked her teeth, eyeing the damp ombre hair Eureka flicked to the right, making it harder for her aunt to see her face.
“Ditto,” Eureka muttered.
“Baby, that’s not
Eureka looked to Dad for help. He’d drained his coffee cup and was staring into it as if he could read its dregs like tea leaves. From his expression, it didn’t look like the dregs had anything nice to predict. He hadn’t heard a word Maureen had said, and Eureka envied him.
“Can it, Mo,” Uncle Beau said to his older sister. “More important things going on than hair. We’re here about Diana.”
Eureka couldn’t help imagining Diana’s hair undulating softly underwater, like a mermaid’s, like Ophelia’s. She closed her eyes. She wanted to close her imagination, but she couldn’t.
Beau was the middle child. He’d been dashing when he was younger—dark hair and broad smile, the spitting image of his father, who, when he’d married Sugar, had acquired the nickname Sugar Daddy.
Sugar Daddy had died before Eureka was old enough to remember him, but she used to love looking at the black-and-white photos of him on Sugar’s mantel, imagining what his voice would sound like, what stories he would tell her if he were still alive.
Beau looked drained and skinny. His hair was thinning at the back. Like Diana, he didn’t have a steady job. He traveled a lot, hitchhiked most places, had once somehow met Eureka and Diana on an archaeological dig in Egypt. He’d inherited Sugar and Sugar Daddy’s small farm outside New Iberia, next to Brooks’s house. It was where Diana had stayed whenever she was in town between digs, so Eureka spent a lot of time there, too.
“How you getting on at school, Reka?” he asked.
“All right.” She was pretty sure she’d failed her calculus quiz this morning, but she’d done okay on her Earth Science test.
“Still running?”
“I’m captain this year,” she lied when Dad lifted his head. Now was not the time to divulge that she’d quit the team.
“Good for you. Your mama’s a real fast runner, too.” Beau’s voice caught and he looked away, as if he were trying to decide whether to apologize for having used the present tense in describing his sister.
The door opened and the lawyer, Mr. Fontenot, strode in, squeezing past the buffet to stand before them at the head of the table. He was a slope-shouldered man in an olive suit. It seemed impossible to Eureka that her mother could ever have met, much less hired, this man. Had she picked him out at random from the phone book? He made no eye contact, just picked up a manila folder from the table and flipped through the pages.
“I did not know Diana well.” His voice was soft and slow, and there was a little whistle in his
