The Inheritance

As Martha pulled out onto the street, the dark horizon trembled with lightning. She was so familiar with the desert’s moods and seasons after all these years. If she went on a day trip to Mississippi as she privately planned, would that landscape speak to her from the level of genetic memory? Would she vibrate like a tuning fork when she approached the town of Baghdad, where the late aunt who had raised her and the mother she did not remember had grown up, where her unknown father might live?

Sam had never entirely understood his family’s abrupt exodus from Atheneum, and Martha knew even less about the reason for her own departure from Mississippi. This upcoming trip represented the opportunity for both husband and wife to retrace the early journeys over which neither had had any control. As she had suggested, they would be heading home, as in the places where they had been born, and she was both excited and a little apprehensive.

Their situations were very different. Sam would be returning to a town where the Stahlings name was an institution. Martha had been a Hampton, and she had no known living relatives in Mississippi. It was hard to know what kind of people the Hamptons had been, but there was reason to be a little anxious. After all, Loretta had raised her in a mobile home in a trailer park, something Sam, who never asked questions, did not know.

What Sam did know was that Martha had won a scholarship to college as a champion diver and was teaching with a master’s degree with honors in English. He also knew that her late aunt had been a teacher and a tennis coach, an outstanding athlete in her own right. From Sam’s perspective, Martha’s history was as compact as her slight physique, the story of a person whose development had been guided by her own will, talents, and ambition as well as the high expectations of an aunt he had never met. Sam apparently trusted what he saw and perhaps liked the simplicity of it.

As she drove on toward the fragrant prospect of rain, Martha hoped that things would remain that simple. In her purse was the former address of her Hampton grandparents. The look of that homestead would tell her a lot about the kind of people they had been, and that was a discovery she intended to make on her own. She glanced over at Sam, feeling a little guilty about concerns she couldn’t share. Miz Stahlings could not possibly have anticipated all the consequences of her will bidding for Sam’s return, and Martha could only hope that she would prove as wise as she had been willful.