After Rebirth I Refuse Favoritism; Three Ungrateful Sons Regret It

“Mom, take them back.” Beryl pushed the property title and the bankbook into my hands. I didn't take them. “Don't fight with my brothers over me. Great-Uncle Silas and the others won't let this go. Cross the clan in this village and the two of us won't be able to take a single step.” I looked at her, remembering how I'd married her off in my last life without even giving her a decent quilt to take with her. What I said was that a married-off daughter is like water thrown out the door. What I was thinking was the money I could save for my three sons. I pushed her out just like that, and in all her life she never once came to me asking for a single cent. And in the end she was the one who borrowed three hundred dollars and knelt in the mud of the pigsty to see me off. “Beryl, your mother was blind before.” “From now on, you're the only child of my blood I claim.” “The clan can go to hell. As long as we have money and we're in the right, no one can crush us.” I didn't sleep that night. I waited until Beryl was fast asleep in the inner room, then reached under the bed and pulled out a ledger. The pages were packed tight with writing, some of it blurred with age, but every page ended with a red thumbprint. That had been my habit for decades. Every dollar that went out, I wrote it down and pressed my thumb to it. My three sons had always laughed at me for going to all that trouble. Now the ledger was about to earn its keep. At first light I woke Beryl, told her to put on clean clothes, and got ready to go into town for the transfer. I'd barely pulled the courtyard gate open when a row of people blocked the way. Winston stood at the front, with the village head, Alex Gray, behind him, and seven or eight gray-haired clan uncles besides. Winston's wife dropped straight down into the mud, slapping her thighs and wailing. “Come judge this, all of you! The old woman's lost her mind. She wants to hand the family property to an outsider! She's trying to wipe out the Finch line!” Great-Uncle Silas thumped his cane against the flagstone, and his voice cut over Julia Clayton's wailing. “Mrs. Finch, you've thrown out the rules! Property passes to sons, not daughters. The ancestors set it down that way!” “If you don't produce that title today and hand it to Winston to hold for the family, we'll strike you from the clan register, and you won't be allowed into the ancestral graves when you die.” The clan uncles nodded in unison, every one of them fixing me with an elder's glare. I turned, went back inside, and came out with the ledger. “You want to judge this? Fine. Let me read it out for you.” I made my voice loud on purpose, loud enough for half the lane to hear. “Nineteen ninety-eight, Winston got married. Betrothal gifts and the banquet, two hundred thousand. I hauled bricks at the kiln for three years to scrape it together. Red thumbprint, right here.” “Two thousand three, Jayden bought a used truck to run freight. A hundred thousand. I mortgaged my pension for it. Red thumbprint, right here.” “Two thousand six, Albert got into a fight and had to pay the other man's medical bills. A hundred and fifty thousand. I poured in the money that was meant to save your father's life. Red thumbprint, right here.” “Over a dozen years, the three of them sucked four hundred and fifty thousand out of me. Great-Uncle Silas, do the math for me. Principal and interest, how much do they owe?” No one in the courtyard said a word. I swept my eyes over the clan uncles. “You want rules? I want rules too.” “All these years, I'm the one who's given them money. They never gave me back a single cent.” “Have them cough up that four hundred and fifty thousand, principal and interest. The day the money's in my hand, I'll hand over the title with both hands.” “If they can't produce the money, then every last one of you can shut up.” Great-Uncle Silas's lips trembled for a long moment, and not one word came out. Winston glanced at the village head, and the village head put his hands behind his back too. “I came meaning to talk sense by the old customs, but now that I've heard all these accounts……” “Even an honest judge can't settle a family's affairs……” Seeing they'd lost the nerve they'd come in with, I took Beryl by the hand and started out the gate. Albert's voice came from behind me. “Mom, that sickly husband of Beryl's is still lying in the county hospital, kept alive on a ventilator.” Beryl's hand jerked back. “What if I went to the hospital to talk over his condition with the doctors, pull a tube or two, or the hospital happened to cut off his medication……” I gripped Beryl's arm and stared Albert down. He thought he'd finally gotten a hold on me. “Mom, think it over again.”

Beryl's knees went weak. In my last life it went exactly like this. She dropped to her knees and begged them to let her husband go. The more she begged, the harder they squeezed her, until in the end they even cut off the money for his treatment. I let go of Beryl, turned around, and slapped Albert across the face, once, twice. "You so much as touch a hair on my son-in-law's head at that hospital, and I'll go straight to the kitchen for a cleaver and split you open first." Albert clutched his cheek, the look in his eyes shifting from disbelief to fear. He'd known me sixty years and never once seen me like this. "Mom, you've lost your mind." "If I have, you're the one who drove me to it. Get out!" Albert stumbled back three steps. Great-Uncle Silas and the other clan elders traded glances, and none of them dared say another word. I took Beryl by the arm and turned to leave. "Mom, if they really do go to the hospital—" "We're going there right now." At the inpatient ward, before we even rounded the corner of the hallway, I heard Julia's shrill voice. "Don't let this woman fool you! She ran off with her old mother's money to elope with some other man, and she doesn't care whether her own husband lives or dies!" At the nurses' station, a few of the nurses stopped what they were doing and looked over. Beryl froze where she stood, tears sliding down one after another. Julia turned, saw us, and a flicker of triumph crossed her face. "Well, well. The old lady's come to shield this shameless little tramp?" "Hand over the bankbook and the property deed today, or I'll make sure she can't show her face in this hospital." I took a deep breath and kept myself calm. "Julia, if you want to settle accounts, then let's settle them properly." "The fifteenth of last month, room 203 at the Riverside Inn in town, you and Riley, that contractor from the site, got a room together, and you accidentally paid for it on Winston's card, didn't you?" The murmur in the lobby cut off all at once. "That hundred thousand for the bricks when your brother built his house, that came out of Winston's project accounts too, cooked off the books by you." "Should I call Winston right now and tell him to go home and check the ledgers?" Winston had said all this in my last life, drunk, sitting at the edge of my paralyzed bed, crying. He said he hated it, hated how spineless he was. But once he was done hating, the next day he tied me up in the pigsty just the same. "You wretched old hag, you're making it up!" Julia shrieked and threw herself at me like she'd gone mad. That was exactly what I'd been waiting for. I brought the cane up, dead on target, and cracked it against her kneecap. "Aah—" She screamed and pitched forward, hitting the floor. Security came running from the far end of the hall, took her by both arms, and dragged her out. I took Beryl to go pay the next month's hospital fees in full. The phone in my pocket rang. It was Chad Lawrence from the county housing authority in town. "Ma'am, listen to me, this won't stay quiet much longer." "That old country house of yours, the official paperwork is about to come down. It's being zoned into the core parcel of the new development district. You're looking at ten million at the very least in compensation." "Word's already leaking out around town. Whatever you do, guard that property deed, and watch yourself." In my last life, it was this money that made my three sons tie me up and throw me into the pigsty. This time, it had come even earlier than I remembered.

I stayed with Beryl at the hospital all afternoon. Toward evening I told her I was going back to the old house to pack a few clothes. She didn't want me to go alone, but I waved her off. "Your mother knows what she's doing." Behind the old house ran a narrow alley, a gap squeezed between two courtyard walls, just wide enough for one person to stand sideways. I didn't go inside. I stood in the back alley, and Winston's voice leaked out through a crack in the window. "A million dollars! A whole million! The old hag's for sure going to sign it over to Beryl!" "So what do we do, Winston?" "We've got to get her under control before the housing authority opens tomorrow. As long as we can prove she's crazy, that money splits three ways between us brothers, and nobody else!" Albert volunteered. "I know a guy. He's got the psych kind of pills. Crush some into water, pour it down her throat, and she'll be like a vegetable, sign anything you want." Jayden said, "Better to just tie her up with rope, stuff her in the pigsty, starve her a couple days. She'll sign whether she wants to or not." Winston slapped the table. "Both work! We do it two ways. Get the pills, keep the rope ready, and move tomorrow night when nobody's around." I clenched my fists. Exactly the same path as my last life. The rope. The pigsty. The drugged water. Sixty years I raised them, and this was what it came to. Nothing happened all through the next day. I knew they were waiting for dark. By evening the weather turned. Black clouds pressed down, and the wind sent the tin basin in the yard banging and clattering. "I'm going over to the old house to check the doors and windows are shut." "Mom, let me come with you." "No. You stay with your husband." I walked into the old house alone. I didn't turn on a light. I felt my way through the dark and sat down in the high-backed chair dead center in the front room. The wind kept rising. Raindrops hammered the roof tiles like a drum. I sat in the dark, listening to my own heartbeat, one beat and then the next. The night I lay dying in the pigsty last life, it had been a rainy night just like this. Bang. The door was kicked open. Winston had a stack of papers and a box of red ink paste in his hands. Jayden had a nylon rope coiled around his fist. Albert carried a cup of water that gave off a sharp chemical stink. Winston walked up to me. "Mom, your head's been foggy lately. Your sons are taking you to a nursing home to live easy." "Be good, press your thumbprint, drink this calming water down, and it's easier for everyone." I didn't move. I didn't say a word. Jayden lunged in and threw the rope straight over me. Albert grabbed my chin and pushed the cup up to my mouth. They had me pinned hard to the chair, nowhere left to go. The rope pulled tighter and tighter, and I suddenly laughed. The three of them froze, thinking my mind really had gone. "You really think I came here to die alone tonight?"