Twelve Rooms with a View
When a rich man you never knew dies and his opulent apartment is left to you, you’d think it was the answer to your dreams. But perhaps it is the start of a living nightmare…a sharp, intelligent and dark tale from the creator of hit series SMASH.Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Or is it?Tina Finn was standing at the edge of her mother's newly-dug grave when she first heard about her inheritance. Until this moment she'd been scraping by, living from one pay cheque to the next. But all that was about to change…Now she's the proud owner of a huge luxury apartment overlooking Central Park. Things couldn't get much better, right? Wrong. Her half brothers, left out of the inheritance, think that she has no right to the apartment and they want her out - by any means necessary.So that's how Tina went from standing on the edge of her mother's grave to squatting in a twelve room apartment in the centre of New York. Now she has it all, is she prepared to fight to the end to keep it?
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Twelve Rooms with a View
Theresa Rebeck
For Jess Lynn
Table of Contents
I was actually standing on the edge of my mother’s open grave when I heard about the house. Some idiot with tattoos and a shovel had tossed a huge wad of dirt at me. I think he was more or less perturbed that everyone else had taken off the way they’re supposed to and then there I was just standing there like someone had brained me with a frying pan. It’s not like I was making a scene. But I couldn’t go. The service in the little chapel had totally blown, all that little deacon or whatever he was talked about was God and his mercy and utter unredeemable nonsense that had nothing to do with her so I was just standing there and thinking maybe there was something else that could be said while they put her in the earth, something simple but hopefully specific. Which is when Lucy came up and yanked at my arm.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to talk about the house.”
And I’m thinking, what house?
So Lucy drags me off to talk about this house, which she and Daniel and Alison clearly had already been deep in conversation about for a while, even though I had never heard of it. Which maybe I might resent? Especially as Daniel obviously has an interest but no real rights, as he is only Alison’s husband? But I’m way too busy trying to catch up and get something resembling a shred of information out of them all while we crawl to Manhattan from Hoboken through the Holland Tunnel.
This is what the conversation is like, in the crummy old beige Honda that Daniel insists on driving because even though the thing is ugly it still works:
“The lawyer says that it’s completely unencumbered. She died intestate, and that means it’s ours, that’s what the lawyer says.” This from Lucy.
“What lawyer?” I ask.
“Mom’s lawyer,” she says.
“I have a hard time believing that that is true,” Daniel says.
“Why would he lie?” Lucy shoots back at him.
“Why would a lawyer lie? I’m sorry, did you just say—”
“Yes I did. He’s our lawyer. Why would he lie?”
“You just said he was Mom’s lawyer,” I point out.
“It’s the same thing,” she tells me.
“Really?” I say. “I’ve never even heard of this guy, and I don’t know his name, and he’s my lawyer?”
“Bill left her his house,” Lucy tells me again, staying on point. “And since she died without a will that means it’s ours. Mom has left us a house.”
This entire chain of events seems strangely impossible to me. I’m always so chronically broke and lost in a kind of underworld of trouble that a stroke of luck like an actual house dropping on my head could only be true if it were literally true, and I was about to find myself like the Wicked Witch of the East squashed to death under somebody else’s house. Surely this cannot actually mean that. To get to the bottom of it all I continue to repeat things people previously said. “Bill left her his house?”
“Yes! He left her everything!” Lucy snaps.
“Didn’t he have kids?”
“Yes, in fact, he did,” Daniel pipes up. “He had two sons, two grown sons.”
“Well, didn’t he leave them something?”
“No, he didn’t,” Lucy says, firm. Daniel snorts. “What? It’s true! He didn’t leave them anything!”
“The lawyer said it wouldn’t matter whether or not they agreed to the terms of their father’s will,” Alison notes, looking at Daniel, trying to be hopeful in the face of his inexplicable pessimism about the fact that somebody left us all a house.
“If the lawyer said that, he’s a complete moron,” Daniel informs her. “I called Ira, he’s going to take a look at the documentation and let us know what kind of a mess we’re in.”
“It’s not a mess, it’s a house,” Lucy notes, sort of under her breath, kind of peevish. She doesn’t like Daniel. She thinks he’s too bossy. Which he is, considering that we didn’t all marry him, just Alison.
So we take a left out of the cemetery and go straight to the lawyer’s. There was no brunch with distant relatives and people standing around saying trivial mournful things. Which I didn’t mind being spared and I don’t know that we would have been able to find anybody who knew Mom anyway, but truly I did think that at least the four of us were planning to stop at a diner and have some eggs or a bagel. But not the Finns. We get right down to business. Before noon there we were, squashed around a really small table in a really small conference room in the saddest Manhattan office you ever saw. The walls were a nasty yellow and only half plastered together; seriously, you could see the dents where the Sheetrock was screwed into the uprights. The tabletop was that kind of Formica that vaguely looks like wood, in somebody else’s imagination. Honestly, I was thinking, this is a
