Mother Left Us the Weather
A woman's will leaves her children separate pieces of the local weather.
ImagineYourBook writes a fresh draft from this idea.
How it begins
Mother left Simon the sunshine and me the rain.
The solicitor read this without looking up, as though he had distributed weather before and found it no more troublesome than dividing the silver.
Simon glanced at me. I looked at the carpet.
There had been a stain beside my shoe when we arrived. Now there was a puddle.
"Is this a metaphor?" my brother asked.
Mr. Cobb moved his wastepaper basket beneath a drip.
"No."
Outside, the February morning brightened around Simon's parked car. Inside, water ran down the back of my neck.
Mother had been dead eleven days. I had spent eight of them believing the worst part would be choosing what to do with her clothes.
"She can't leave him all the good weather," I said.
"The sunshine," Mr. Cobb corrected. "Not necessarily all the good weather."
Simon opened his mouth, then closed it. That was a family habit. We had several, most of them inherited before anyone signed anything.
A beam of sunlight fell across his hands.
I remembered those hands at fourteen, holding our father's empty fishing boots. Mother had taken the boots away. She had taken most difficult things away before we could decide whether we wanted to keep them.
"There's a codicil," Mr. Cobb said.
Of course there was. Mother had never ended a conversation when you expected.
He unfolded a second sheet.
Neither of us was to dispose of our share until we had lived with it for thirty days. Neither of us was to travel more than twenty miles from the other. Failure to observe either condition would release the remainder.
"What remainder?" Simon asked.
The solicitor glanced at the ceiling.
A low roll of thunder moved through the room above us. There was no room above us. His office occupied the top floor.
For the first time since the funeral, Simon reached for my hand.
I almost let him take it.
Then the rain stopped falling on my shoulders and began falling on his.
He looked so astonished that I laughed.
It was the first unkind thing I had enjoyed in eleven days.
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Outline and characters
- Nora receives rain at the reading of the will.
- Simon discovers his sunshine follows him even indoors.
- They try selling their weather to different local businesses.
- The deals upset the town's seasonal balance.
- Their mother's notebooks reveal decades of weather absorbed from grieving neighbors.
- Nora resents being left the visible burden while Simon profits.
- Simon's constant sunlight begins exhausting the people he loves.
- They uncover a final storm their mother never allowed herself to release.
- The siblings cancel their contracts and invite the town to share the rain.
- They keep an imperfect joint forecast and meet weekly without pretending reconciliation is finished.
Characters
- Nora Pell, 46. An estranged daughter who inherits her mother's rain
- Simon Pell, 42. Her brother, who inherits the sunshine and its hidden costs
Series possibilities
- A neighboring family asks the siblings to help settle an inheritance of tides.
