Margaret's Will

As an internet volunteer at the library, I get occasional glimpses into people’s lives. Most of them amuse me, a few sadden me, and every once in a while, something chilling comes along.   

I’m sitting at the volunteer’s desk, checking out the latest issue of Creative Knitting, when I hear Laura, one of the library technicians, say my name.  “Talk to Brenda. She’s the internet volunteer. She’ll help you.”

The elderly man and young woman standing in front of Laura’s station both look over at me. He is well presented, clean-shaven with a full head of neatly-trimmed hair, but his demeanor does not match his grooming. He peers vaguely at me, as though he’s just found himself standing in the library and doesn’t know how he got here. His companion’s demeanor is equally odd. She is young and pretty, with Bambi-lashes surrounding velvety-brown eyes that express the intense relief suitable for a drowning person spotting a lifeboat. I ask how I can help them. The old man tells me he wants something printed.

“Do you have a library card?” I ask him.

“No, but she,” he points to Laura, “says you can do it anyway.”

“How about you?” I turn to the young woman, who is drifting away from us toward the reference stacks.

“I have a card, but I don’t need to use it.”

“You’ll need it to log on to an internet station.”

She glides closer to the stacks. “I don’t need to.”

“She’s helping me,” the man says.

Behind him, the woman shakes her head hard enough to dislodge the hair tucked behind her ears.

“You’re not with him?” I ask.

“No, I’m here to do research.” She takes two more steps backward and disappears between the shelves.

I ask for the man’s ID to sign him on as a guest. He produces a driver’s license. In the picture, his features are the same, but somehow more inhabited than his real face, and I wonder if my client is senile.  This suspicion seems confirmed when he asks twice if printing is possible. He signs his name, very slowly, in clear round handwriting that doesn’t appear to have changed since he went to grade school approximately seventy years ago.

“So what do you want to print?” I ask.

He pulls a grimy envelope out of his pocket and extracts two typewritten pages. “This. It’s my wife’s will. Can you print it?”

I’m confused as to why he wants to print something that is already on paper, until I take the pages from him and really look at them.

The larger page is headed LAST WILL AND TESTEMENT OF MARGARET JONES BROWN.  The word BROWN is hand-lettered. Below the heading and following the sound-of-mind legalese, are five numbered bequests dealing with things like disposal of remains and clearance of outstanding debts. The paper is uneven at the bottom, as though carelessly cut with small scissors.

The smaller page is similarly uneven at the top and contains bequests number 13 and 14, which appear to dispose of the remainder of Mary’s estate equally among her  heirs , followed by some signed-and-dated verbiage over empty signature lines where the name JONES is again scratched out and replaced with a hand-lettered BROWN.

I hand the pages back. “Where’s the rest of it?”

Clearly, he doesn’t like the question. He responds with one of his own. “Where’s that girl who’s going to help me?” Most people would look around the room when they ask a question like this. He keeps his attention on my face.

This puts me off. I feel like the target of that neuro-linguistic programming trick, the one where the programmee is lulled into an agreeable mind-frame by being primed with affirmatively slanted questions, as though he’s getting me to buy into the idea of helping him look for the girl as a setup for more elaborate assistance.  I force myself not to look around and say “I don’t know.”

He asks me the same thing twice more, gets the same answer, then gives up on that angle and asks again if I can print the will. I explain to him that before he can print anything, it has to be put into the computer. He gets frustrated, says he doesn’t want the computer, he wants a typewriter. Then he asks where the girl is.

I offer to tape the two pieces of paper together and photo copy them, even though I’m sure the missing bequests would invalidate the will in probate. Again, he asks where the girl is, which seems to be his standard response to anything I say that he doesn’t like.

We go around this bush a few more times, during which I learn Margaret has “terrible arthritis” and can’t leave the house, which is why she is not here with him. I finally realize he’s waiting for me to offer to type in the text and print out the will on a single, contiguous sheet of paper because “that damn lawyer put things in I don’t want.”

By this time, my mental landscape is littered with red flags. How stupid does he think I am? And how much longer would poor, housebound Margaret be around if she signed a revised will? Determined not to help this man in any way, I tell him a holographic will is every bit as valid as a typed one, and suggest he copy the document out himself, under the assumption that Margaret is able to recognize the difference between a handwritten document and a typed one. He asks where the girl is. I repeat I don’t know. He tells me his son’s girlfriend knows how to type and leaves the library.

Ten minutes later, he’s back with his son’s girlfriend, Phyllis, a middle-aged woman with the barrel-like physique of her pure Inuit heritage. She claims she knows how to use a computer, but when I tell her to click on an icon to open the word processor, she doesn’t know enough to release the mouse button and drags the icon all over the screen. Clearly, Phyllis interprets the concept of honesty with extreme flexibility.

I open the document myself and show her as little as I can get away with about things like using up and down arrows and shift keys. She nods when I ask if she understands.  

Phyllis follows her almost-father-in-law’s instructions obediently as she types the revised will (in a bizarre mixture of upper and lower case  because she keeps accidentally hitting the capslock key) using the hunt and peck method she learned at the two-finger school of typing. As their hour on the computer approaches its end, they are just over halfway through the document, which will disappear as soon as their time is up. I think about just ignoring this, but find myself incapable of such active malice.

What happens next is entirely unintentional and downright embarrassing. I get the library USB drive and save the document to it. As I do this, I note neither of them thought to renumber provision 13, which I find reassuring. I check to make sure the document is on the drive before taking it out of the port.  I log them back on for another hour, but when I open the USB drive, the document is not there. Flustered by my careless destruction of Phyllis’ hard work, I offer to re-type the first part of the document before I can stop myself.   

The old man asks how long it will take, peppering his question with enough crude language to alleviate any guilt on my part as I respond with my standard, “I don’t know,”  and leave it at that.

This is when Phyllis develops a sudden, intense need to leave the library. She takes the old man by the elbow and steers him, not very gently, toward the door. I watch them leave with the same relief Bambi-girl felt when she saw me.  

I strongly doubt Margaret is in any danger from these inept plotters, if they are in fact plotters, and not just a senile old man and his son’s dim-witted girlfriend.  I am curious though. What do you suppose was in those removed bequests?