My Aunt Left Her Nephews $2 Million And Left Me Her Parakeet. Then The Lawyer Read Who Has To Sign Before They See A Dime

“To my niece, Ruth Mattox,” the lawyer read, “I leave my parakeet, Petey, together with his cage, his cuttlebone and his mirror. I also leave her my recipe box and my 2006 Mercury Grand Marquis.”

Odette Ostrander laughed. It was a short, bright laugh, like somebody had told a joke at a cocktail party, and she covered her mouth with two fingers right afterward, the way people do when they want you to know they couldn’t stop themselves.

“Well, Ruth,” she said. “You got the bird.”

Her husband, Mitchell, didn’t laugh. He just leaned back in the leather chair and folded his hands over his stomach. He’d already heard the important part. The house on Pleasant Street and everything in the investment account at the bank, about two million dollars all told, to be divided equally between Aunt Pauline’s two nephews, Mitchell and Reid Ostrander.

Reid sat at the far end of the conference table next to his wife, Monica, looking at the grain of the wood.

I sat with my purse on my lap and my coat still on, because the conference room at Marsh and Reinholt was cold, and because I had not expected to stay long.

I’m sixty-four. I did hair for thirty-eight years at a salon on Front Street in Mankato, Minnesota, and I’ve heard every kind of laugh there is. Odette’s was the kind you hear from a woman in the chair who has decided you work for her.

“Petey’s a very good bird,” I said.

“I’m sure he is,” Odette said.

Quentin Marsh, the lawyer, who was about seventy and had been Aunt Pauline’s lawyer since the late seventies, didn’t look up. He turned the page.

“There’s more,” he said.

Thursdays With Aunt Pauline

To understand what came next, you have to understand Aunt Pauline and Thursdays.

She was my mother’s older sister. She married Ozzie Ostrander in 1954, and Ozzie built Ostrander Implement out on Highway 169 into the biggest farm equipment dealership between Mankato and the Iowa line. Combines, grain carts, tractors the size of a house. They never had children. Ozzie died in 1998, and Pauline sold the dealership two years later and lived very quietly on the money in the same yellow house on Pleasant Street.

The Ostrander side of the family, Ozzie’s brother’s boys, always called it “Uncle Ozzie’s money.” They said it at Christmas like a weather report. Mitchell went off to Chicago and did something in commercial real estate that involved a lot of airports. Reid sold insurance in Scottsdale. They came at Christmas and sometimes in July, when it was nice. They brought flowers from the grocery store.

I lived eleven minutes away. My mother was gone by 2003, and my husband, Orrin, by 2014. After that, Thursdays were the day I spent with Aunt Pauline. I did her hair at her kitchen sink every week, a wash and set, the same way since 1983. Then we’d do whatever needed doing.

And on Thursdays, Aunt Pauline drove meals.

She’d done it for forty-one years. The church on Broad Street ran a hot-meal route for shut-ins, twelve stops, mostly old farm couples and widowers who’d moved into town. Pauline took Thursdays in 1982 and never gave them up. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, a dinner roll in a foil packet, a cup of canned peaches. She’d pick up the coolers at ten-thirty and be done by one.

“You don’t just hand them the tray,” she told me once. “You go in. You check the furnace. You look in the refrigerator for spoiled milk. You find out who’s sick. Half these people, we’re the only face they see all week.”

When her eyes got bad, in 2015, I started driving. She rode in the passenger seat of the Mercury with the clipboard on her lap and the stop list in her own block printing. She’d tell me where to turn twenty feet too late, every week, and every week I’d say, “Aunt Pauline, I know where Mrs. Quarles lives.”

“I’m just saying,” she’d say.

The last two years, she couldn’t get out of the car. So I went in. I’d come back out and report. “Mr. Novak’s furnace is making that noise again.” “Mrs. Quarles wants the peaches without the syrup.” And Pauline would write it all down.

The last three months, she couldn’t ride at all. So I drove the route alone and came back and told her everything while I did her hair in the hospital bed in her living room.

She died on a Thursday in August, around four in the afternoon. I’d finished the route at one.

The Second Page

“Article Seven,” Quentin Marsh read. “The Thursday Provision.”

Mitchell sat up.

“The shares of my estate left to my nephews, Mitchell Ostrander and Reid Ostrander, shall not be distributed outright. They shall be held in the Pauline Ostrander Trust, and each nephew’s share shall be distributed to him only after he has personally driven the Thursday meal route of Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church for twenty-six Thursdays, within twelve months of my death.”

Nobody said anything.

“Each Thursday,” Quentin continued, “my niece, Ruth Mattox, shall ride along in the passenger seat. At the end of each route, she shall sign the route log if, in her judgment, the work was done properly. That means going inside, checking on each person, and paying attention. Ruth’s signature is final. She is the sole certifying party, and no court, trustee or lawyer may overrule her.”

I felt my face get hot all the way up to my hairline.

“Any share not earned within twelve months,” Quentin read, “shall pass to my niece, Ruth Mattox, who never missed one.”

He set the page down and took off his glasses.

“And there’s a standard no-contest clause,” he said. “If either of you contests the will or the trust, you forfeit your share entirely. I’d advise against it. I drafted it.”

“This Is Elder Abuse”

Mitchell was the first to speak, and he spoke to me.

“Did you put her up to this?”

“I didn’t know a thing about it,” I said. Which was true. I’d sat in that cold room expecting to drive home with a parakeet.

“She was ninety-three years old,” Mitchell said, turning to Quentin. “She was legally blind. She was on God knows what medication. And this woman” (he pointed at me with his whole hand, like a man hailing a cab) “was alone with her every week. This is textbook undue influence. This is elder abuse.”

“Mitchell,” Reid said quietly.

“No. No. She does her hair, she drives her to the grocery store, and she gets to decide if I get my inheritance? Uncle Ozzie’s money? From a cooler of meat loaf?”

Quentin folded his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. He’d been a lawyer for forty-five years. He’d heard worse.

“Your aunt signed this in my office in March of last year,” he said. “She had a capacity evaluation from her physician the same week, which is in the file. Two of my staff witnessed it. She dictated Article Seven to me word for word, and then she made me read it back to her twice.” He paused. “She also told me you’d say exactly what you just said.”

Odette had stopped smiling.

“Twenty-six Thursdays,” she said. “He lives in Chicago. He runs a company. Does she expect him to just fly up here every week to deliver Jell-O?”

“I believe,” said Quentin, “that’s exactly what she expects.”

Reid hadn’t said a word yet. Monica was whispering to him urgently, and he kept nodding without looking at her.

Then he looked down the table at me.

“What time do you pick up the coolers?” he asked.

“Ten-thirty,” I said. “At the side door of the church.”

He nodded slowly, like he was writing it down in his head.

Mitchell stood up so fast his chair rolled into the wall.

“I’m not doing this,” he said. “I’ll have my own people look at it.”

“Please do,” said Quentin. “And Mr. Ostrander? Have them read the whole thing. It’s thirty-one pages.”

Mitchell walked out. Odette picked up her purse and followed. The door hissed shut on its closer.

Before I left, Quentin handed me two things. The first was a manila envelope with Pauline’s spare house key and the title to the Mercury. The second was a smaller envelope, sky blue, sealed, the kind of stationery she used for thank-you notes.

On the front, in her block printing, it said: RUTHIE. OPEN THIS IF MITCHELL OFFERS YOU MONEY.

I looked at Quentin. He shrugged.

“She was very specific,” he said.

Reid Gets Lost on Mound Avenue

I picked Petey up from Aunt Pauline’s house that afternoon. He’s a little green budgie with a yellow face, nine years old, and he only says three things: “Pretty bird,” “Ozzie’s home” (Pauline must have taught him that one in her own grief, years before I ever heard it), and “Ruthie’s here.” That last one he picked up from hearing me call it through the screen door every Thursday.

He said it when I came in to get him. I had to sit down on the stairs for a minute.

The first Thursday of the trust was September 4th. I pulled into the church lot at ten-twenty-five, and there was a white rented Tahoe parked by the side door with Arizona plates on the rental tag. Reid was leaning against it in a quarter-zip pullover and loafers, holding a cup of gas station coffee.

“Monica thinks I’ve lost my mind,” he said.

“Did you?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I rented an apartment. Month to month, over by the college. My partner’s covering the office till spring.”

I showed him how to load the coolers. Hot ones in the back, cold ones on the floor behind the passenger seat so the milk doesn’t tip. He did it wrong, and I made him do it again.

He got lost twice the first day. Once on Mound Avenue, where the street splits, and once looking for the Novak place, which is behind a car wash and doesn’t have a visible number. He tried to hand Mrs. Rademacher her tray on the front step, and I said, “Go in,” and he looked at me like I’d asked him to climb in her window.

“Aunt Pauline said you go in,” I said. “You check the furnace. You look in the refrigerator.”

“I can’t just look in somebody’s refrigerator.”

“You can if you’re the one bringing the food.”

At the end of the route, sitting in the Tahoe in the church lot, I took the clipboard and looked at it for a long time.

“Well?” he said.

I signed it. But I wrote underneath, in the margin: “Didn’t go in at Rademacher. Next week he goes in.”

He read it and laughed. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh since the funeral.

Mrs. Quarles Knew His Mother

Ondine Quarles was the ninth stop. She was ninety-seven, lived alone in a little white house on Park Street with plastic on the sofa, and had been on the Thursday route longer than anybody.

On the third Thursday, she looked at Reid in her doorway for a long time.

“You’re Patsy’s boy,” she said.

Reid stopped with the tray in his hands.

“Patsy Ostrander,” Mrs. Quarles said. “Your mother. We taught Sunday school together at Holy Redeemer for twelve years. You had a cowlick right there. You threw up on the Christmas pageant manger in 1972.”

Reid’s mother died when he was fourteen. I knew that. I didn’t know until later that he hadn’t been back inside Holy Redeemer since her funeral.

Mrs. Quarles made him sit down on the plastic sofa. She brought out a photo album with a cracked spine and showed him a picture of a young woman in cat-eye glasses holding a felt board full of Bible animals. He held it for a long time.

We were forty minutes late to the last three stops. I signed the log anyway.

After that, he came early. He started bringing Mrs. Quarles a newspaper. He fixed the storm door at Mr. Novak’s that had been banging since April. He found a pill organizer full of the wrong week’s pills on Mrs. Rademacher’s counter and called her daughter in Rochester, and he didn’t mention it to me until three days later.

Every week I signed the log. Every week I wrote something underneath, the way Pauline would have. “Good with Novak.” “Forgot the peaches.” “Stayed an hour at Quarles.”

Monica flew up in October. She rode in the back seat one Thursday with her arms crossed. By the fourth stop she was carrying trays.

Mitchell Comes to My Kitchen

Mitchell didn’t come to the church lot. Not the first Thursday or the fifth or the eighth.

His lawyer in Chicago sent Quentin a letter. Quentin sent back a letter. I wasn’t copied on either one, but Quentin called me afterward and said, “His lawyer has read the no-contest clause now,” in a tone of voice I’d describe as satisfied.

Then, on a Sunday afternoon in late October, Mitchell Ostrander knocked on my back door.

I was making chili. Petey was on his perch by the window. Mitchell stood in my kitchen in a camel coat, looking around at my linoleum and my avocado-colored stove like he was pricing it.

“Ruth,” he said. “Let’s be adults.”

“All right.”

“I can’t take six months off to drive meat loaf around Mankato. You know that. Pauline knew that.” He sat down at my table without being asked. “So here’s what I’m proposing. You sign the logs. All twenty-six. We say I did it. Nobody gets hurt. Those people still get their food, you’re still driving it anyway.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“I’m not finished.” He took out a checkbook. An actual checkbook, leather, with his initials on it. “Fifty thousand dollars. To you. Today. Call it a consulting fee.”

Petey said, “Pretty bird.”

I stood at my stove holding the wooden spoon. And I thought about the blue envelope, which was sitting in the drawer of my sewing table, where I’d put it in September and tried very hard not to think about it.

“Wait right here,” I said.

The Blue Envelope

I opened it in the sewing room with my reading glasses on.

Inside was one sheet of her sky-blue stationery, written in the big black block letters she used after her eyes went, so she could see what she was writing.

RUTHIE.

I BET HE SAID FIFTY THOUSAND. HE ALWAYS DID LIKE A ROUND NUMBER.

DON’T TAKE IT. CALL QUENTIN. TELL HIM TO TURN TO PAGE 27, ARTICLE NINE. MITCHELL NEVER READ PAST PAGE THREE OF ANYTHING IN HIS LIFE.

YOU WERE THE BEST THING ABOUT EVERY THURSDAY. I LOVE YOU. P.

I sat down on the sewing chair. I read it four times.

Then I went back into the kitchen. Mitchell had the check filled out on my table. The pen was still in his hand.

“I’m going to call Quentin Marsh,” I said. “You can stay or go.”

He looked at me like I’d slapped him.

“Ruth, don’t be…”

I picked up the phone on the wall. Quentin answered on the second ring, on a Sunday, like he’d been waiting by it for two months.

“He offered you money,” Quentin said.

“Fifty thousand.”

He actually laughed. “She called that too,” he said. “Put me on speaker.”

Page 27

Article Nine of the Pauline Ostrander Trust was a single paragraph. Quentin read it slowly, over the speaker of my kitchen phone, while Mitchell stood by my refrigerator with his coat open.

“If any beneficiary offers or gives money, property or anything of value to the certifying party, or to any person on the Thursday route, for the purpose of obtaining a signature for work he did not personally perform, that beneficiary’s share shall be forfeited in its entirety and shall pass as provided in Article Seven.”

“That’s not enforceable,” Mitchell said.

“It’s a condition on a gift,” said Quentin. “She can attach any lawful condition she likes to her own money. And if you want to contest it, Mr. Ostrander, see Article Eleven, the no-contest clause. Which your Chicago firm has now read, I believe.”

Mitchell looked down at the check on my table. He picked it up and folded it in half, then in quarters, and put it in his coat pocket.

“She did this to humiliate me,” he said.

I thought about it. I wanted to be fair.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she did it so you’d come visit.”

He left without saying goodbye. I watched his rental car back out of my driveway too fast and clip the edge of my snowbank, which wasn’t even a real snowbank yet, only the first one of the year.

Mitchell has not contested. His lawyer advised him not to. I’m told he still says, at parties in Chicago, that his crazy aunt left her fortune to her hairdresser.

I suppose that’s one way to tell it.

Twenty-Six Thursdays

Reid finished on the third Thursday of March. There was still snow in the shade along the church wall.

That last day, Mrs. Quarles had a coffee cake waiting for him, and she’d written in frosting on top, crooked: PATSY’S BOY. Mr. Novak gave him a fishing lure he’d tied himself in 1968. Mrs. Rademacher’s daughter had driven down from Rochester just to shake his hand.

In the church lot, at one-fifteen, he handed me the clipboard.

I looked at that final page for a while. Twenty-six signatures down the side. Twenty-six notes in the margin, some of them not very nice.

I signed the last line. Underneath I wrote: “Went in. Every time.”

Reid read it. He didn’t say anything. He just held the clipboard against his chest for a moment, like you’d hold a coat you weren’t ready to give back.

“I’m keeping Thursdays,” he said. “If that’s all right with you.”

“You live in Scottsdale.”

“Monica and I are looking at a place over by the river,” he said. “She says Arizona’s too hot anyway. She’s lying. But she’s been on Mrs. Quarles’ sofa four times now, and I think she likes being somebody’s face for the week.”

His share came through in April. I don’t know exactly what he did with it, and it isn’t my business. I do know Holy Redeemer has a new delivery van with a cooler built into the back, and that nobody at the church will tell me who paid for it.

Mitchell’s share came to me.

I want to be honest. I didn’t know what to do with it for a long time. I’m a retired hairdresser. I drive a 2006 Mercury that smells like hairspray and meat loaf.

I paid off my house. I paid for Mr. Novak’s new furnace, because the old one finally quit in January and the church fund couldn’t cover it. I put money away for my grandkids. And I set up a little fund through the church, in Aunt Pauline’s name, so that anybody on the Thursday route who needs something fixed doesn’t have to wait for somebody to notice.

The rest is sitting in the bank. I’m not in any hurry. I’m sixty-four. It turns out you can be rich and still not want anything.

Ruthie’s Here

I still drive Thursdays too. Reid and I split the route. He takes the first six stops; I take the last six. We meet in the church lot at one and compare notes over gas station coffee, and I tell him he’s still cutting the corner on Mound Avenue.

Petey lives on my kitchen windowsill now, in Pauline’s old cage, with his cuttlebone and his mirror.

On Thursday mornings, when I come back in from scraping the windshield, he still says it. Every week. Right when the back door opens.

“Ruthie’s here.”

I always tell him I know.

Aunt Pauline left her nephews two million dollars and left me her bird, and when Odette laughed, I didn’t say anything, because it had never occurred to me to want more than the bird.

But she left me something else in that cold conference room. She left me the last word. She just made sure I’d be the one holding the pen when it came time to write it.

If you know someone who shows up every week for someone else and never asks for anything, pass this along to them. They probably don’t hear thank you nearly enough.

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