Mein Sohn sagte, seine Frau wolle mir eine Lektion erteilen, also haben sie mir zu Weihnachten nichts geschenkt. Sie wussten nicht, was in meiner Handtasche war.

“I’m sorry, Jo. But she is. And she’s gotten herself a bad lawyer.” She tapped the letterhead. “Grant Kessler. I know Grant. He’s what we call a professional guardian. He files these petitions for families who want Grandma’s money, and then he bills the estate two hundred and fifty dollars an hour as the conservator’s lawyer. He’s had two complaints with the bar that I know about.”

“Can they do this?”

“They can try.” She leaned back. “Here’s how it works. They file an emergency petition. They make it sound bad. Stove left on, money flying out the door, crazy old widow screaming at her family on Christmas. If a judge believes there’s an emergency, he can freeze your accounts for thirty days until there’s a full hearing. No notice to you. You find out when your debit card bounces at the grocery store.” She put her glasses back on. “And then you spend the next month proving you’re not crazy. Which, Jo, is a very hard thing to prove when you’re angry. Angry looks crazy on video.”

“So I don’t get angry.”

“So you don’t get angry,” Ruth said. “And you don’t cry. And you don’t throw anything. Whatever they do on Christmas, you sit in Walt’s chair and you are the calmest woman in Ashworth County.” She looked at me over her glasses. “Can you do that?”

“I taught ninth grade for eleven years, Ruth.”

She laughed for the first time.

“All right,” she said. “Then here’s what we do.”

We did three things. First, on the eighteenth of December, I spent four hours at the office of a geriatric psychiatrist in Dunmore named Dr. Imani Brooks.

She tested my memory, my reasoning, my judgment, my arithmetic, and my ability to explain the plot of a novel of my choosing, which I chose to be Middlemarch, which I believe she regretted.

Her letter, dated that afternoon, was two pages long.

The last line said: In my professional opinion, Mrs. Pruitt possesses full decision-making capacity, and her financial decisions, while generous, are consistent with her long-held values and those of her late husband.

Second, Ruth had a notice to vacate drawn up for the townhouse on Larkspur Lane. Thirty days.

“You don’t have to use it,” she said. “But you should have it.”

Third, Ruth wrote a letter. To Grant Kessler. It said that Mrs. Pruitt was aware of the draft petition, had been independently evaluated, and would respond to any filing in full.

“You want me to send it now?” Ruth asked. “Scare them off before Christmas?”

I thought about it for a long time.

“No,” I said. “Put it in an envelope with the other two.”

“Jo.”

“If I send it now, they’ll just wait,” I said. “They’ll wait until I’m sick, or tired, or sad, and they’ll try again. I want to know who they are, Ruth. All of them. I want to see it with my own eyes.”

“And Tyler?”

I didn’t answer that. Ruth was quiet for a while.

“What about the money?” she said finally. “The hundred and fifty.”

“I’ll take care of that,” I said.

On the night of the eighteenth, I went home and sat at Walt’s desk and wrote out two envelopes.

In the first, I put a signed gift letter and a wire authorization for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, payable to Tyler and Brooke Pruitt, dated December twenty-sixth. In the second, I put Ruth’s three pages.

The notice to vacate. The petition. Ruth’s letter, with Dr. Brooks’s report stapled behind it.

I sealed them both. They looked exactly alike. I put them both in my handbag.

And I made myself a promise. If my son put one thing under that tree with my name on it, one thing, a card, a candy cane, a drawing on a napkin, I’d give him the first envelope.

And I’d deal with my sister on my own. I wanted to believe he didn’t know. I wanted to believe it so badly that, three days before, I had almost talked myself out of all of it.

On the fifteenth of December, a Tuesday, I drove over to the townhouse on Larkspur Lane with a cardboard box in my back seat. Walt’s ornaments. Not all of them.

Just the ones that had been Tyler’s when he was little, with a note taped to the lid. The clay snowman. A felt reindeer with a pipe-cleaner nose.

A paper star with his kindergarten photo glued in the middle. I thought maybe Tyler would want them on his own tree. I thought maybe it would remind him of something.

It was two in the afternoon. Brooke’s crossover was in the driveway. So was Darlene’s sedan.

The front door was open a crack, the way it always is when Brooke is carrying in packages, because she never closes anything behind her.

I was halfway up the steps with the box in my arms when I heard my sister laugh. I know that laugh. I’ve known it for sixty-three years.

“She’ll cry,” Darlene was saying. “Trust me. She always cries when Tyler’s short with her. She cried when he didn’t call on her birthday. She’ll cry right there in front of Ray and Patty and the whole family, and I’ll have my phone up.”

“And if she doesn’t?” Brooke said.

“Then you push. Tell her she buys people.”

“She buys people?”

“Say it exactly like that. You buy people, Joanne.” Darlene laughed again. “Mama said it to her at Daddy’s funeral. In front of the whole family. She’s never gotten over it. Say that, and she’ll fall apart.”

I stood on the steps with the box of ornaments in my arms. I couldn’t feel my hands.

“And Tyler doesn’t know?” Darlene asked.