What Dad Left

Dad kept everything in a shoebox. Not a metaphorical shoebox. A Clarks box, size ten, on the top shelf of the airing cupboard, and when Mark got it down there was a moment where all three of us just looked at it on the kitchen table like it might do something. "Right," said Karen, who is the eldest and has therefore been in charge since 1979. "Let's see what we've got." What we had was: the deeds. A building society passbook, the kind they haven't issued in twenty years, with a balance of just over four thousand written in blue ink. Seven premium bond certificates. His will, in a solicitor's envelope, which we'd already seen. A folded sheet of paper with a list of his pension providers, three of them, from three different jobs, with phone numbers that were probably out of date. And, right at the bottom, a photo of the three of us on the beach at Filey, about 1985, me in a bucket hat looking furious. "Why's that in there?" Mark said. "Because he's Dad," Karen said, and put it aside without looking at it too long. The will was simple. Everything split three ways. The house, the savings, the bonds, the shed full of tools nobody knew how to use. Simple on paper. The house was where it went sideways. Mark wanted to sell. He's got two kids and a mortgage that keeps him awake and a third of a semi in Scarborough would, he said, "actually change things". He said it looking at the table. Karen wanted to keep it. Rent it out, she said, or just keep it, because Mum's roses were still in the garden and Dad had rebuilt that wall himself, and once it's gone it's gone. I didn't know what I wanted. That's the honest answer. I'm the middle one. I've spent forty-one years not knowing what I want between those two. "We can't keep a house as a memorial, Kaz," Mark said. "I'm not saying memorial." "You're saying we pay council tax on a museum." "I'm saying not everything has to be turned into money the second it stops moving."

That was unfair, and she knew it, and she didn't take it back. We stopped for the day. Mark went to the pub. Karen went out to the garden and stood by the roses in her coat. I sat with the shoebox and, for something to do, rang the first pension number. It was out of date. The second one wasn't. A woman called Jasmine put me on hold for eleven minutes and then came back and said, in a careful voice, "Are you aware there's a death-in-service benefit attached to this scheme?" I said I wasn't. She read me a number. I asked her to read it again. When Mark got back I had it written on the back of the Filey photo, because it was the nearest bit of paper, and I held it up. "What's that?" "That's from the pension at the bus company. Turns out he never took it. There's a lump sum." Mark read it. He read it again. He sat down. "That's not a third of a house," he said slowly. "But it's a lot of the way there." Karen came in from the garden. I showed her. She looked at the number, and then at the photo it was written on, and she laughed, once, a wet sort of laugh. "He'd have loved that. Filing it on the back of Filey." "So," Mark said. "So," Karen said. We haven't decided. I want to be honest about that. But we've agreed Mark takes his share of the lump sum now, and we don't talk about the house again until spring, when the roses are up and we can see what we're actually talking about. The box is on my shelf now. Karen said I should have it, being the one who rang the number. The photo's on the front of it, blu-tacked, my furious little face looking out at the living room.