I found this site, which offered this prompt: Start with this, “It’s all perfectly clear now.”
“It’s all perfectly clear now,” Lauren said.
The phone call ended shortly after she agreed to the clarity of the explanation. New Jersey would be closing shop for the day soon, and her questions sounded redundant even in her own ears. She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose, because nothing seemed any more clear than it had when she picked up the phone to call her father’s attorneys. The details of the educational trust tangled together, backtracking on themselves and becoming more weighted with every question Lauren asked about applying it to her daughter’s potential boarding school.
Not that she wanted June to go away to school yet, anyway, Lauren reminded herself. She opened her eyes and stared at the notes she’d started to write, crossing out certain words and circling others. Her father’s pre-mortem wishes, like most else about his post-mortem legacy, seemed overly complicated, a puzzle to solve instead of a gift to her sixteen year old. Whether or not the money could be used for pre-college study seemed to be straightforward enough, but he’d added preferences about which areas of the country were permitted. The geographical stipulations possibly ended with high school graduation and possibly didn’t, depending on grades and what June’s post-high school plans might be.
It didn’t help that Lauren hadn’t truly slept in days, in not weeks. Her father’s death hadn’t shocked her in the least; she’d known for years he lived on borrowed time after a life spent cultivating every bad habit one could find between Atlantic City and Las Vegas and back again. What shocked her were the breadcrumbs he’d left for her to follow, emails, phone calls, and even a hand-delivered letter from his lawyer’s office, all containing new twists and addendums to a will she had been surprised he’d even created in the first place. Her grief teased at her, leaving her to wonder whether he was engaging her in one final puzzle or flipping her a seriously severe proverbial bird.
Scowling at her notes one more time, a copy of the trust agreement in pages across her desk, Lauren swept it all onto the floor. She’d be the one to pick up the pages, but she was used to doing that. Tears threatened but she squeezed her eyes shut before they could consider falling onto her cheeks. She didn’t need the money to send her daughter to school anyway. Lauren let herself admit, for just a second, that she wanted June to feel closer to her grandfather, even if only when tuition was due. If anything at all was crystal clear, it was that her relationship with her own father never had been, and apparently never would be.
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