The Bones of the Story by Carol Goodman

Author:Carol Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

Then

I couldn’t tell my mother that my roommate was going to pay my tuition—she would have been too proud to take charity—so Laine came up with another plan.

“I come into my inheritance in February on my twenty-first birthday and my accountant has been on me about making charitable donations to avoid taxes. All the Wilders donate to Briarwood. I could endow a scholarship and arrange for you to win it.”

I listened to her machinate as we walked to the cafeteria and classes through the snow, dazzled as much by the pristine, sparkling winter campus as by Laine’s talk of lawyers and taxes and endowments. It wasn’t just that she was a year older than the rest of us (she’d lost a year due to how much her mother moved her around), but that she possessed the gravitas of property and old money. She took seriously the weight of being the last of the Wilders—she had no siblings or cousins and her grandmother had bypassed Laine’s mother in the line of inheritance to leave Laine the Wilder fortune.

“I’m just like Roderick Usher,” she was fond of saying, “living in a cracked house waiting for the roof to fall in. I might as well spread the wealth.”

Still, I was doubtful that she’d be able to pull off her plan. Why would anyone let a twenty-one-year-old dictate the rules of a scholarship? Would her lawyer even allow such a thing? My only knowledge of bequests and wills and codicils came from Bleak House, which we were reading in our Victorian Novel class, and which suggested being an heir to a fortune never seemed to do anyone any good. But Laine was no shrinking Victorian heroine. On the day after her twenty-first birthday, which we celebrated with martinis at Alumni House, Laine and I met in the Rose Parlor with Dean Haviland, Associate Dean Hotchkiss, and Laine’s lawyer, Mr. Humphreys, a white-haired older man in a tweed suit with an accent that reminded me of Thurston Howell on Gilligan’s Island. Over a pot of Darjeeling, Laine outlined her plan for an endowment that would fund a center for creative writing to be called the Moss Writers House, including money for a writer-in-residence, funds to maintain Wilder Hall, and a full scholarship for a creative writing student. As she described it, drawing loops in the air with her long, slim fingers, I could see Dean Hotchkiss’s eyes light up at the idea.

“What an asset to the college that would be!” he exclaimed, the delicate china teacup shivering in its saucer as he set it down. “And a boon to admissions and fundraising . . . but do we really want to call it Moss Writers House?”

“I wanted to honor Hugo Moss,” Laine replied. “Although I haven’t taken his class yet I’ve read his books and heard what an amazing teacher he is.”

“Admirable,” Dean Hotchkiss said, pursing his lips as if the word tasted bad, “but why not honor your own family and call it

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