Ill-Gotten Gains

The day after the funeral was an interesting one. I was excused from school that day, as well as the entire week before. Life's little blessings.

I was a senior in high school, and I was rounding out my secondary scholastic career with a resounding squish. It wasn't that I was a poor learner, or that I just didn't like school, it was moreso that for those 7 hours a day I could have been doing something much more constructive, like sleeping or banging Batman action figures together and providing my own sound effects. My grades were always "disappointing" because I myself considered a life spent leaning over a geometry book to be "disappointing." All I cared about was to pass, graduate, and never get myself associated with a group, club, or activity that would at all insinuate to an observer that I cared about anything. I remember one girl in my class who joined and chaired every club she could squeeze her name into, thinking it would be good for college. She went to a state school and cried every night because she wasn't in an Ivy League school, then she finally transferred to an Ivy League school and now makes a disgusting amount of money; almost as much money as her therapist makes, the one she sees three hours a day twice a week now. Perhaps most startling here is how on Earth I know all this, but if I had to choose one hobby of mine as my favorite, it would have to be finding out which people who were insufferable as teenagers are now living hallow and insipid lives that will spiral down into manic dementia in coming years. Current tally: all of them.

Anyway, the day after the funeral my mom was scheduled to meet with a lawyer (ours, hers, or theirs, I gathered) to go over the will. His office called early that morning to request that I be there too, which was kind of weird and was a gigantic imposition to my already-planned day of staring out my bedroom window and reconsidering everything I ever knew about anything. Lawyer's offices and A1 paper is no way to spend any amount of time.

"It says what?" my mother asked.
The lawyer registered her shock, "It is a bit… unconventional, but -- yes. A year and a half ago your husband increased his life insurance payout from $250,000 to $750,000 and altered his will specifically stating that, upon his death, $500,000 of it should go to Christopher regardless of his age."

I was entirely speechless. I'd heard of families receiving a nice payout for a death like this, but that was always for crazy-ritch people. Wasn't a life insurance policy meant to make up for how much money the person would have made if he were alive and working? We definitely aren't a $750,000 household. More importantly, how did I just go from having $112 dollars to my name to having $500,112 in seven seconds?

Mom seemed to be dealing with that and a few hundred other little bombshells. Increasing his life insurance by half a million dollars was odd, not telling her was odd, requesting that most of it was odd, and doing so regardless of my age was really odd.

"Isn't it illegal to give inheritance to someone under 18?" she asked.
"Not illegal, just rather stupid. Different states may treat it differently, but it's certainly possible. Usually in situations like this we'd put the money in a trust until the child turns 18, especially since Chris turns 18 in only four months, but the will is specific," the lawyer said.

"Maybe for college?" I said, finally able to speak.
They both looked at me, the lawyer glanced back at my now speechless mom and back at me. "A decent university is about $40,000 a year," he paused, uncomfortable; "Were that the case, he probably would have wanted the money left in escrow or at least just given to your mother."

And just like that, I entered lower upper class and my mom entered upper middle class. The weight of this never seemed to soak in. It, along with the death of my father just seemed to swarm around right above me, out of my grasp. I spent the next few days trying to figure out what had happened, but the mysteries just kept stacking up no matter what way I shuffled them.

The weirdest thing of all, as if any of it could be sorted, is that when my mom checked my dad's account histories she found that he was spending almost all of his pay on the new insurance premiums in the months since he increased his policy. It's almost like he knew he was going to die.