The Standing Yes

The hospice off Peachtree had been decorated by somebody who believed very hard in the colour of oatmeal. Junia Ancrum had been coming through its doors for five weeks now and she still could not walk the corridor without her jaw setting: the low sofas, the framed prints of marsh grass, the coffee machine in the family lounge that made a noise like a man clearing his throat and produced something the colour of weak tea. She took a cup anyway. She always took a cup. It gave her hands a job between the car and the room.

The smell was the thing. Underneath the lilies at the nurses' station and the lemon of whatever they ran over the floors at six in the morning there was a warm, close, sweetish note that belonged to nothing else on earth, and it got into cloth. She knew that by now. It would be in her jacket at four o'clock and it would be in her jacket at seven, and she would hang the jacket by the window at home with the sash up and it would still be there in the morning, faint, like a voice in another room.

She had worn the jacket anyway. Slate-grey, wool and silk, cut in a way that had cost more than her first car, and she had stood in front of the closet at six-fifteen that morning with two others in her hand and put them back. September in Atlanta did not care that it was the seventeenth; she had sweated through the walk from the deck to the entrance and she would sweat again on the way out. It did not matter. Bernice Mabry would notice. Bernice Mabry had noticed a loose button on Junia's cuff in the third year of their acquaintance and had said nothing about it, which was worse, and nine years later Junia still dressed for that room like it was the Court of Appeals.

Room 12. She knocked twice with one knuckle and went in on the second.

"There she is," Bernice said. "Come in out of that hall, it's depressing."

She was sitting up. She was always sitting up. The bed had been cranked to a position that no one recovering from anything would have chosen and she had a pillow behind the small of her back and her hands folded on the blanket, and she was wearing a bed jacket in dusty rose with a shawl collar, and pearl studs, and every one of her rings. Four of them, two on the left hand and two on the right, and the joints under them had swollen enough over the summer that they were not coming off again without a jeweller and a saw, and she had decided in June, out loud, that this was a problem for somebody else. Her wig was on and it was straight and it was the good one. Seventy-nine years old, ninety-one pounds, and every morning she made somebody help her sit up and put her face on and then she sent them away.

"You look well," Junia said.

"I look expensive," Bernice said. "There's a difference, and you of all people know it. Sit down, put that terrible coffee on the sill, and take out your pad."

Junia set the cup on the windowsill. She sat in the vinyl chair, which sighed, and she took out the legal pad and unclipped her pen, and something in her chest that had been standing on its toes since the parking deck came down flat, because this part she knew how to do. Seventeen years of it. A room, a client, a pad. Whatever else was happening in the building, in this chair she was competent.

"Instructions," Bernice said. "I want to make a gift."

"All right."

"To the Threshold Fund. Seven figures. I'd like it done inside two weeks."

Junia's pen did not stop moving, because her pen had been trained out of stopping in her second year of law school, but she took the extra half-second before she looked up that she took when she needed one. She had a habit of holding very still while she decided what to say, and she was aware of it, and she had never managed to break it and had eventually decided it did her more good than harm.

"How much of seven figures?"

"One-point-two. Out of the residue, or however you do it. That's your part."

"And the rest of the estate stands as it is."

"The rest of the estate stands. My brother's boy gets what he gets and he'll live." Bernice's mouth moved. "He'll be very sorry about me for about a month."

"Bernice."

"He will. That's not a complaint, that's a forecast." She lifted one hand an inch off the blanket and let it settle again. "Two weeks."

Junia wrote Threshold Fund — $1.2M — residue? and under it TIMING and underlined it once, which was as much as she permitted herself on a client's pad.

"Tell me about the Fund."

"You'll have looked it up already."

"You left the name on my voicemail on Tuesday and hung up before you said anything else, so yes." Junia let that sit for a beat. "I looked it up at half past ten last night, and I would still like to hear it from you. There's a version of this conversation where I don't ask questions and there's a version where I do. You're paying for the one where I do."

"Mm." Bernice looked pleased, which was not the reaction Junia had wanted and was the one she usually got. "Go on, then. Ask."

"It's a 501(c)(3). It's five years old. Its stated purpose is legal defence and emergency support for adults who lose custody, or a professional licence, or a job, or a lease, on account of their lawful private lives." Junia read it off her own notes flatly, the way she would have read it to a room. "That's the language on the determination letter. Lawful private lives."

"That's the language," Bernice agreed.

"It discloses no donors. It discloses no applicants and no recipients. Not names, not counts, not categories, not city. The 990 is clean and it is also the thinnest 990 I have read in a decade." She turned the page over. "And it is co-hosted by a private members' association with an address off Memorial Drive that has no website, no listed telephone, and a corporate filing with two officers and a registered agent who is a law firm I have never heard of."

"You have very good handwriting," Bernice said, "for somebody working up to something."

"I'm not working up to anything. I'm telling you what the file looks like from outside, because in about nine months one man who is very sorry about you for a month is going to be looking at it from exactly there." Junia set the pen down across the pad. "A gift of one-point-two million, made in the last two weeks of a life, by a testator under a morphine order, to an organisation that will not say where the money goes, that shares an address and a governing body with a private club nobody can look up. Bernice. I could break that. On a Tuesday. With one associate and a subpoena."

The air conditioning cycled up under the window and the lilies at the nurses' station went on doing whatever it is lilies do.

"Then don't let it be breakable," Bernice said.

"That's the job. That's what I'm sitting here doing."

"I know what you're doing, honey. I've watched you do it to other people for nine years and it's a pleasure. Do it." A small, complacent adjustment of the shawl collar. "But you're not going to make me tell you why, and you can put down the pen for that part."

"I don't need why."

"You want it."

"I want a great many things," Junia said. "What I need is diligence. That is a shorter list and it is not optional." She picked up the pen again. "Determination letter, five years of returns, articles, bylaws, conflict-of-interest policy, the board minutes for the last three cycles, and their disbursement records in whatever form they can give them to me without breaking their own confidentiality — aggregate is fine, I don't need names, I need to see that money goes out the door to the purpose. The relationship with the members' association in writing: who owns the premises, who pays whom, whether one of them is a fiscal sponsor of the other or they're simply friendly. And a physician's letter on capacity, dated the day you sign, and a witness who has never met either of us."

"You're enjoying this."

"I'm not enjoying any of it."

"You're enjoying some of it," Bernice said. "That's allowed. You always did like a list."

Junia let out a breath through her nose. "The list is what makes it hold, Bernice. That's the whole of what I do for a living. Somebody sits in a room like this one and says a thing out loud, and I turn the thing into an instrument, and if I've done it properly then it binds you. Against everybody. Including you." She heard her own voice do the thing it did in front of a nervous client, gentling out, and she let it. "That's the point of it. Not that it's your wish — wishes go where the wind puts them. That it's executed. Once it's done it's done, and a year from now, or ten, whatever anyone in that hallway feels about it, including you, it does not get a vote. The paper outlasts the feeling. That's what you're buying from me."

Bernice looked at her for a long moment with her head very slightly tilted, and there was something in the look that Junia did not care for and could not have named, and would think about at a red light on the way back downtown and not get anywhere with.

"That's a good speech," Bernice said. "Do you believe it?"

"I've built a career on it."

"Mm," said Bernice, "that's not the same," and then, before Junia could decide whether to answer that, "Fine. Do your list."

"Thank you."

"The Fund will give you everything you ask for. So will the other one." A small smile, entirely private. "That's the part you're going to find annoying."

"Why would I find that annoying?"

"Because you've got the whole drive over here to work out how you're going to prise it out of them," Bernice said, "and you're going to be so disappointed when nobody puts up a fight."

Junia declined to answer that, which Bernice accepted as an answer, and they went through the residue and the specific gifts and the church for another twenty minutes, and Bernice's instructions were precise and unsentimental and she did not say if at any point in it. At half past eleven she began to tire — Junia could see it arrive, a grey coming up under the makeup like water into sand — and Junia closed the pad on her own next question and put it away.

"Two weeks," Bernice said, from the pillow.

"Two weeks is aggressive."

"So am I."

"I'll have a draft to you Monday week and I'd like the diligence closed before you sign. Not after. In that order."

"You and your order." Bernice's eyes had shut. Her hands were still folded, and the rings sat where they sat, and her hands were entirely steady, which Junia noticed and did not say anything about, because there was nothing to say about it that would not have been about herself.

In the corridor Junia stopped by the marsh-grass print and got the pad back out and stood there writing, one shoulder against the wall, in the loose fast hand she used when nobody was going to read it but her. Determination ltr. 990s x5. Bylaws. Minutes. Disbursement — aggregate. Premises: who owns. And then, at the bottom, underlined twice, the thing she had already known would be at the bottom of it since half past ten the night before:

Memorial Dr. — go in person.

Because there was no telephone number and there was no website, and diligence on a seven-figure gift did not get done by email with an organisation that did not answer email, and what that meant — what it flatly, unglamorously meant, at twenty to twelve on a Thursday morning in September — was a legal pad and somebody's front desk.

She put the pad in her bag. She was three steps toward the lobby before she remembered the coffee, still sitting untouched on the windowsill of room 12 where she had set it down forty minutes earlier, gone cold and skinned over, and she did not go back for it, and the smell of the corridor came out into the heat with her in the weave of the best jacket she owned.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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