Chapter 6

The locked drawer was not impressive.

It was the bottom drawer of the dresser in Ruth's bedroom, the one that stuck a little when you pulled it, the one she had to lift with one hand on the front edge to get it to slide all the way out. Inside, there were no jewels, no safe-deposit boxes, no bundles of old bills. There was a manila folder, worn at the corners, and a blue expandable file, and a small spiral notebook with a red cover.

Ruth opened the manila folder first. She took out the deed — not a copy, the original, with the gold seal from the county and the signatures of her husband and herself in their own handwriting — and she laid it flat on the bed.

"This is the first one," she said. "We bought this house in 1987. Your uncle and I were both thirty-one. We had a down payment from our parents, and a mortgage that felt like a mountain, and we used to sit on the front steps and drink cheap wine and watch the neighborhood kids ride their bikes."

Claire stood at the foot of the bed, looking at the deed. She did not touch it.

"The house was always meant to be a family home," Ruth said. "But the family is not just one family. It's the whole chain of people who come through. My mother gave me her recipes. My father gave me his father's watch. When I'm gone, the chains get passed on, and they'll be passed on to Margaret, and she'll add her own."

"What made you choose her?" Claire asked.

Ruth sat on the edge of the bed. The deed was on the mattress beside her. In the expando file were the financial papers — the bank statements, the investment accounts, the insurance policies, the records of twenty years of careful living.

"She works at a diner," Ruth said. "She's been working there for four years, nights, to pay for school. She lives in the basement of her aunt's house, and the basement has a window well that floods, and she's been sleeping with her law books stacked on a chair by the bed because there's no bookshelf. She came to church one Sunday because her aunt made her. She sat in the second row, and she looked exhausted, and she was wearing a coat that was too thin for the weather."

Ruth paused.

"I sat next to her after a service, and I asked her what she wanted to do with her life. And she told me she wanted to be a public defender. She told me she'd grown up in foster care, and she'd been to court nineteen times before she turned eighteen, and she'd never once had a lawyer who looked at her like a person. She said that was why she wanted to go to law school. So she could look at people the way she'd wanted to be looked at."

Claire was very quiet.

"She's never asked me for money," Ruth said. "I offered to help with tuition, and she said it was too much, and she couldn't accept it. I told her the money was already set aside for something I'd decided not to do, and I wanted to do it for her instead. She still said no. It took six months to convince her to let me pay for her first semester, and she cried when I wrote the check."