19. Julian was living in a sooty apartment next to an iron foundry in Memphis when he received a letter announcing that his great-grandfather’s estate had finally been cleared up. He stood in the doorway of his peeling duplex, his hands shaking as he read the terms. Most of the property had been sold off to satisfy liens and lawyers’ fees, but the old country house and six acres remained, along with twenty-eight thousand dollars. Julian was a thin man of sixty-three, balding, a typewriter repairman who worked out of his spare bedroom and kept to himself. The one time he’d seen the grand old home was when he was eight, riding past it on a gravel road with his mother, back when she could afford a car. The mansion was surrounded on three sides by rows of cracked Doric pillars, its second-floor gallery missing many balusters, its windows patched with cardboard. Back then, it had been occupied by a glowering family of squatters who’d slouched on the porches and stared after his mother’s black Ford as it crawled past the fence. For all he knew, they were still there. He went inside, out of the late-June heat, and sat in a duct-taped recliner to reread the terms of his good fortune. The only extra money he’d ever had was a hundred-dollar win on a scratch-off ticket. Before his mother died, he’d spent two years at a tiny local college and considered himself at least wealthy in knowledge, more so than the shopkeepers and records clerks he dealt with. Normally, he disparaged people who owned large houses, yet deep in his heart he’d stored the memory of the old mansion, the only grand thing in his family’s history. It had shamed him to long for the house, and now he owned it.
