Page 74 of The Drifter

"Mm." I heard her settle into a chair. "Your mama used to say that."

"I know she did."

We sat there a moment, the two of us, a hundred years of ground between us and neither one of us saying the thing.

Then, I said it.

"I want to stop it, Verlie. The sale. The whole thing. Robert signed his piece, and if one more of them signs, they can go to a judge and force it. I have been reading about this for weeks now and it’s happening to families like ours all up and down these islands. Somebody buys in, and then they petition, and then it all goes on the courthouse steps, and the family that worked it for a hundred years walks away with a check that doesn't cover what they lost." My voice was doing a thing and I let it. "It's legal. That's the part that makes me sick. Every bit of it is legal."

"It's legal," Verlie agreed, soft. "Legal as Sunday."

"I have money," I said.

The words came out of me plain and they landed in that phone like a stone in a well. There was a silence after them. I sat in it and made myself stay in it and did not fill it up.

Because that was the thing I had never once said out loud to my family. Not in all these years. I had the condo and the savings and the banked years and the good view, and I had built all of it quietly, carefully, never spending, never traveling, never taking one thing for myself. I had let my people believe I was just the girl at the hotel, because the alternative was to be the one who had gotten out and left them on the island with the tax bills.

"I know you do, baby," Verlie said. Gentle. No edge on it anywhere. "You think your mama didn't know? You think we don't all know? Girl bought a place on the water outright and thinks she hid it." A soft sound. "We're proud of you. Don't you ever think we ain't proud of you."

My eyes went hot. I didn’t let them go over.

"I want to probate it," I said. "Properly. Clear the title, put it in the family's name the right way, the way it should've been done a hundred years ago and nobody would let us. I want to pay the back taxes and I want to hire the meanest lawyer in Charleston County and I want to make it so that no cousin in Atlanta and no firm in Mount Pleasant can ever do this to us again. I can afford it, Verlie. I ran the numbers. I can afford all of it and still have my life."

Verlie was quiet for a long moment.

"That's a lot of money," she said. "For fourteen acres of pluff mud you can't even build on half of."

"It's not about building on it."

"No," she said. "It ain't." And I heard her voice thicken. "It's about your grandmama shuckin' oysters into a bucket between her knees. It's about that oak. It's about not being the family that let it go." A breath. "Your mama would've stood up in that courtroom herself, if she'd had two nickels to do it with. She never had the two nickels. You do."

"I do."

"Then, I got just one thing to say to you about it, and then, I'll hush." She paused, and when she came back her voice had my mother all through it. "You do this because it's yours. Not because it's ours. You hear me? Don't you make this one more thing you do for other people so you're allowed to stay in the room. You make sure some of it's for you. That land is yours, Sasha. You got as much right to stand on it and say mine as anybody who ever drew breath out here. More. You make sure you go stand on it and say it."

I couldn't answer for a second.

Say mine out loud where somebody could hear me. It was the thing I'd thought in my own bed, before any of this, before him. It was the thing I'd never done in my life.

"Okay," I said, when I had a voice. "Okay. I hear you."

"When you comin' out?"

"Soon."

"You said soon last time."

"I mean it this time." And I did. Something about the day had made soon into a real word again. "The water don't wait on me. You told me that."

"I did tell you that." I could hear her smiling. "All right, baby. You go do your lawyer thing. And then, you come stand on your ground."

We hung up.

And I sat there on my sofa with the phone in my hand and the letter beside me and I didn’t put it back in the drawer. I put it on the coffee table, face up, where I could see it. Then, I opened my laptop, and I started a folder, and I named it, and I typed into a search bar the first of about forty things I was going to need to learn: heirs property attorney Charleston County.

Not the desk. Not for somebody else. For me. For my grandmother's oysters and my mother's oak.

For the first time in my life, I was using the thing I'd built to hold onto something instead of to disappear behind it.