The Kitchen Table Rule

Dad's will said "to be divided fairly among my children," and then his signature, and then nothing, and the solicitor looked at the four of us across her desk and said, "Well. That's going to be interesting." Four of us. Me, the eldest, who left at eighteen and lives in Bristol and comes back at Christmas. Nuala, who stayed, who's farmed it with him for twenty years and lives in the cottage. Brendan, who's in Sydney and hasn't been home in six. And Aoife, the youngest, who's a nurse in Cork and who visited every fortnight when he was sick, which none of the rest of us did. A hundred and forty acres, a house, the cottage, the stock, machinery worth a bit, and a debt worth a bit less. Fairly. Nuala thought fair meant she got the farm, because she'd earned it. Brendan thought fair meant four equal shares, because that's what the word means. I thought fair meant something about Aoife and the fortnights, and couldn't say what. Aoife wouldn't say what she thought, which was its own kind of statement. We had two dinners about it. The first ended with Brendan on the phone from Sydney saying "I'm entitled" and Nuala saying "you've never once driven a tractor" and me refereeing and Aoife washing up. The second didn't get as far as the main course. It was Aoife who came up with the rule. She said it at the third dinner, before anyone had started, with her hands flat on the table. "Here's what we do. Each of us writes down what we think is fair. But you write it not knowing which of us you are." Brendan, on the laptop propped against the teapot, said, "What?" "You write down the split. Who gets what. But you write it as if, after we've agreed, we draw lots for who's who. You might be Nuala. You might be Brendan. You don't know. So you write down a split you could live with whichever of us you turn out to be." Nuala said, "That's daft." "Is it?" "I know who I am."

"Pretend you don't. For one page." I'd heard of this. Some philosopher. A veil. I hadn't thought about it since college and I'd never once thought it was for anything. But Aoife had four sheets of paper and four pens, and she was the one who'd done the fortnights, so we did it. Twenty minutes. The clock in the hall. Nobody talking. Here's what happened, and I'm not going to pretend it was clean. Brendan, who wanted four equal shares, wrote down a split where whoever was farming it got the land and the house, and the other three got the machinery sold and the cash and a charge on the land if it was ever sold. Because, he said afterwards, "If I turned out to be Nuala I'd want the farm, and if I turned out to be me I'd want to not have to think about it." Nuala wrote down almost exactly the same. Then she'd crossed something out and added a line that said the one who did the nursing gets the cottage. She wouldn't say why. She didn't have to. I wrote something more complicated than either, with percentages, and it was worse than both of theirs, and I knew it as soon as I heard theirs read out. Aoife's sheet was blank. She said she'd known what she'd write before she sat down and it wasn't fair to the exercise to write it. Nuala said that was cheating. Aoife said, "Probably," and put the kettle on. We didn't agree that night. Brendan's a stubborn man and the time difference was against him. But the thing had changed. Nobody could unsee what they'd written. Nuala had written, in her own hand, that the nurse should get the cottage. Brendan had written that the farmer should get the farm. Once you've written down what you'd want if you might be someone else, it's very hard to go back to only wanting it for yourself. Not impossible. Hard. It went through in the spring, more or less on Brendan's sheet, with Nuala's line. The solicitor said it was the most sensible outcome she'd seen in a long time and asked how we'd managed it. Nuala said, "Aoife made us do a thing," and left it there. I still have my sheet. The bad one, with the percentages. I keep it in the drawer with Dad's will.