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Siblings Pressured Her to Discard Grandmother's Vanity — Mirror Frame Had $302M in Bonds

The call came on a Tuesday morning, the kind of gray, indifferent morning that arrives in late October without ceremony, when the trees have already surrendered most of their leaves and the sky presses low and flat against the rooftops like a lid being sealed. Marlena Voss was standing at the kitchen counter in her apartment on the third floor of a building that had once been respectable and had since decided against it, spooning instant coffee granules into a chipped mug and listening to her daughter Bea moving around in the bedroom above. The ceiling creaked in the familiar rhythm she had come to know the way she knew her own heartbeat. Three steps to the left, a pause, two steps toward the window, another pause. Bea always looked out the window first thing in the morning. Even at nine years old, she approached each new day with a kind of cautious optimism, as if she wanted to verify that the world was still worth getting up for before she committed to it.
Marlena envied her that. She had stopped checking the window a long time ago.
The phone on the counter buzzed once, twice, and then a third time before she reached for it. The number that appeared on the screen belonged to her brother, Denton. She looked at it for a moment longer than was necessary. Denton did not call her unless he wanted something or had news he could not deliver by text. She answered.
Her grandmother was gone. Passed quietly in her sleep two nights ago at the age of eighty-nine, in the house she had occupied for fifty-one years on the eastern edge of a small town called Cressfield that sat in a shallow valley three hours from the city where Marlena lived. Denton's voice was even as he said it, not cold exactly, but measured in the way of someone reporting a fact they had already had time to process and file away in the appropriate drawer. Marvell Voss had been old. She had been in failing health. This was not unexpected. These were the kinds of things Denton said, and Marlena heard them, but beneath his measured tone she was already doing something else entirely. She was remembering.
She was remembering the smell of her grandmother's kitchen on summer mornings, cinnamon and old wood and something floral she had never been able to name. She was remembering the sound of the old Zenith radio playing in the back bedroom, the one her grandmother kept tuned to a station that played big band music from an era no one else in the family had lived through. She was remembering the bedroom dresser and the vanity beside the window, its surface crowded with small glass bottles and a silver-backed brush set, its mirror framed in carved walnut so dark it was nearly black. She was remembering sitting on the low stool in front of that mirror while her grandmother stood behind her and braided her hair, and the way the woman's hands moved without hesitation, certain and gentle at once, as if everything in life were that manageable if you just paid proper attention.
Denton was still talking. There were arrangements to discuss, he said. There was the house to consider. Their sister Portia was already driving down and Denton would arrive by Thursday. He assumed Marlena would come as well.
She said yes, she would come.
She set the phone down and stood at the counter with her coffee growing cold in her hands. Above her, Bea had stopped moving. The ceiling was quiet. For a moment the apartment felt very still, the kind of stillness that arrives after something has shifted and the world is deciding how to realign itself. Marlena drank the coffee anyway, cold and grainy at the bottom, because she had learned not to waste things she had already prepared for.
The drive to Cressfield took three hours and twenty minutes because she missed the exit she always missed outside of the town of Bellham and added twenty minutes she did not have spare. The car she drove was a 2009 Civic with a crack in the passenger-side mirror that she had been meaning to have fixed since the previous spring and had not because fixing the mirror cost money she did not currently have available for mirrors. Bea sat in the back seat with a book open on her lap and the particular expression on her face that meant she was not actually reading, only using the book as a comfortable place to rest her eyes while she thought about something else. She did not ask questions during the drive, which Marlena was grateful for, because she was not yet sure what answers she had to give.


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