They Paid the Freeloader Son-in-Law to Leave, Then His Grandfather's Will Was Read novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sixty Candles
At his mother-in-law's birthday banquet Nate is handed divorce papers and a check to leave, and that night his grandfather dies and leaves him everything, including the loan her company can't pay.
Barbara Hausler's sixtieth birthday cost forty thousand dollars, and she told every guest at the club it was every penny her own.
Her son-in-law spent the first hour of it parking their cars.
That was Brett's idea.
"Valet called in sick," Brett Shearer said at the door, and tossed him a ring of keys. "You're not busy, right?"
Brett was married to the older Hausler daughter.
He was also vice president of Hausler Homes, the family company, and he had never once driven a nail for it.
He held up his phone and filmed Nate Mazur jogging through the rain to a white Range Rover.
Nate parked eleven cars, then went inside to check on Frank.
His father-in-law sat at the end of the head table in his wheelchair, in a Pirates cap nobody had made him take off.
Frank Hausler had built four hundred houses in the North Hills, including the one they all lived in.
Three years ago a stroke had taken most of his words and the use of his right hand.
Since then the family talked over his head.
Nate crouched beside him and cut his steak into small pieces.
"Too much pepper?"
Frank tapped the table twice with his left hand, which meant yes.
Nate scraped the pepper off.
Across the table his wife caught his eye and mouthed, "Thank you."
Leah had come straight from the job site, and there was still sawdust in her hair under the pins.
She was the only Hausler who could read a blueprint, and her mother paid her less than Brett.
At nine o'clock Barbara stood up with a glass of champagne, and a hundred and twenty people went quiet.
She had a fresh manicure and a cream suit, and she touched one pearl earring while she waited.
"Sixty years," she said. "And I'm told I don't look a day over fifty."
The room laughed.
She thanked her girls, and she thanked Brett, "the son I never had."
She didn't thank Frank, who was sitting four feet from her.
"And Nate." She turned to him with a warm smile. "Three years of my roof and my groceries, and not a dime."
A few people laughed.
Barbara took a cream envelope out of her clutch and held it across the table.
Nate stood up and took it.
Inside were divorce papers with yellow tabs where he was meant to sign, and a check for ten thousand dollars.
"Severance," Barbara said. "It's more than you've earned since you moved in."
This time the whole room laughed.
Brett was filming again.
Frank's chair had rolled an inch on the slope of the old floor.
Nate reached down and set the brake.
He took the napkin from Frank's lap and wiped a spot of sauce off his chin.
Then he laid the check face down beside Barbara's plate.
"Happy birthday, Barbara," he said.
Leah stood up so fast that her chair went over behind her.
She came around the table and took his hand in front of all of them.
"He's not signing anything," she said. "And neither am I."
"Sit down, Leah. You're embarrassing yourself."
Leah bent and kissed her father's cheek.
"Night, Dad."
Frank tapped the table twice.
Nate and Leah walked out through a hundred and twenty people, and the laughing didn't stop until the doors closed behind them.
At 11:40 that night his phone buzzed on the attic floor beside the twin bed.
He knew the number.
He had let it ring every month for three years.
Leah sat up and looked at the screen.
"Answer it," she said. "Nate. Tonight, answer it."
He answered.
It was his grandfather's lawyer, and her voice was very careful.
"Mr. Mazur, he's at the hospital in Shadyside. He's asking for you. They're saying an hour."
Leah drove, and she ran every light on Route 28.
Nate reached the room at 12:14.
The bed had already been laid flat, and the monitors were dark.
The nurse said his grandfather had died at 11:52.
He had missed him by twenty-two minutes.
His grandfather looked smaller than Nate remembered, with his big hands folded on the sheet.
Three years ago, in his study, he had told Nate to choose between the Hausler girl and the Imbrie name.
Nate had chosen Leah.
After that he had sent back every one of his grandfather's letters without opening it.
The lawyer stood by the window, a small woman of sixty-four with her reading glasses on a beaded cord.
"He asked for you until about half past eleven," she said. "Then he stopped asking."
She put her glasses on. "He changed his will in August."
His grandfather had left him everything.
That meant his fifty-one percent of Imbrie Holdings, and his chair at the head of its board.
Imbrie Holdings owned Imbrie Bank, the biggest bank in Pittsburgh, and about half of Grant Street.
She found a line with her finger. "He wanted this read to you exactly."
"To my grandson, the only one in this family who never asked me for a dollar."
"There's a condition," the lawyer went on. "The board has thirty days to confirm you as chairman."
"Until it does, you can't spend a cent, and your uncle stays in charge."
Someone knocked once on the open door.
Richard Imbrie, his mother's younger brother, stood in the hallway with his hands in his pockets.
He was fifty-nine, silver-haired, and he had run the company for three years.
"Hello, Nate. I'm sorry you missed him."
He took a single typed page out of his pocket.
"This is a renunciation. You sign it, the shares come to me, and I write you a check tonight for twenty million dollars."
Nate thought about the cream envelope, and the ten thousand dollars, and a hundred and twenty people laughing.
He thought about his grandfather asking for him until half past eleven.
He wasn't going to sell what the old man had left him on the night he died.
He held out his hand to the lawyer for her pen, and he signed the acceptance instead.
Richard read the signature upside down and nodded.
"Thirty days, then," he said, and walked away down the hall.
The lawyer capped her pen.
"One more thing, Mr. Mazur. You'll see it Monday anyway."
She took a folded agenda out of her bag.
"Hausler Homes is two payments behind on a nine-million-dollar loan from Imbrie Bank. Your uncle put it on Monday's list."
It was Frank's company.
"He means to call it in," the lawyer said.
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