My grandmother, Vera Louise Hutchins, died on a Tuesday in February at eighty-nine years old in the farmhouse outside Lexington, Kentucky where she had lived for sixty-one years. She died in her own bed, which she had specifically requested and which the family had managed to arrange with the help of a hospice nurse named Dorothy who visited three times a week and who my grandmother, characteristically, referred to as “the advance team.”

Vera had been sharp until the final week. Sharp, particular, private about her inner life in the way of people from a generation that considered emotional display a form of bad manners, and possessed of a dry and devastating sense of humor that she rationed carefully so that when it arrived it landed completely.

She left six grandchildren. I am the oldest at forty-four. My name is June. The others range from thirty-eight down to my cousin Mae’s daughter, also named Mae, who was eleven at the time of the will reading and was the only minor among us and had been brought to Lexington by her mother, my cousin Diane, because Vera had specifically requested all six grandchildren be present for the reading.

That specificity, we would understand, was intentional.

The will itself was conventional. The farmhouse and its forty acres were to be appraised and sold, with the proceeds divided equally among the six grandchildren. The personal property — furniture, equipment, vehicles — was itemized and assigned. It was the will of a woman who had thought clearly about what she was leaving and to whom and why.

Phelps, the attorney — a man in his seventies who had handled Vera’s legal affairs for four decades and who had, I think, genuinely loved her in the way of someone who has known a remarkable person for a long time and been glad of it — waited until he had finished reading the will itself before reaching into his folder and producing an envelope.

He looked at all six of us around his conference table.

“Your grandmother gave me this four months ago,” he said. “She was extremely specific about the timing of its delivery.” He set it in the center of the table. “She told me it would be — her word — entertaining.”

The letter was three pages, handwritten in the precise cursive that Vera had maintained her entire life.

She wrote that over the course of her sixty-one years on the farm, she had saved, in cash, two hundred thousand dollars. The saving had been gradual and deliberate — amounts set aside from the farm’s operating revenue, from the sale of livestock over the years, from various other sources she declined to specify. She had saved it outside any bank account, any institution, any record that anyone else could access or know about.

She wrote that she did not entirely trust banks. She had grown up during the Depression and the distrust was constitutional, she explained, and she had made peace with being constitutionally outdated on this particular matter.

She wrote that the money was somewhere on the forty-acre property.

She had hidden it.

She had left clues.

Six clues in total — one in the letter itself, the other five hidden in locations around the property described only in terms she called “oblique on purpose, because oblique requires you to actually think, which most of you could stand to do more of.”

Then she wrote the paragraph that I have read so many times I have memorized it: I expect this will take you at least three days. I expect there will be arguing, because you are my grandchildren and arguing is apparently hereditary. I also expect that you will, perhaps for the first time as adults, spend real time on this land — walking it, knowing it, remembering what your grandfather and I built here over sixty years. That was the point of the exercise. The money is real. It exists and you will find it. But so is this land, and most of you have been too busy to know it for years. Don’t let the money be the only thing you take home.

We spent three days on the farm.

We argued about the clues. We argued about strategy. We argued about who should lead and who should follow and about a decision made regarding the third clue that my cousin Robert interpreted one way and I interpreted another and we were both wrong.

We also, in the spaces between the arguing, did what Vera had known we would do if she got us out on the land together. We walked the fence lines. We found the pond in the east field that none of us had been to since childhood. We ate meals together in the farmhouse kitchen. We told each other stories about her that we hadn’t told before — small specific memories that the formal occasion of her death had not yet provided space for.

On the afternoon of the third day, Mae — eleven years old, observant, entirely unbothered by the adult disagreements happening around her — walked away from our group discussion at the fifth clue location and went to the oldest tree on the property.

The oak in the southwest corner. Vera had called it the Governor in the letter’s first clue — a name none of us had known she used for it.

Mae had remembered.

She was carrying a garden trowel she had taken from the barn without telling any of us.

She crouched at the base of the tree, on the east side, and she dug.

We noticed she had walked away. We followed. By the time we reached her she had already pulled it out — a metal box, the kind sold at hardware stores for fireproofing documents, sealed with a combination lock.

She held it up.

We all went quiet.

Not because of the box. We had expected a box of some kind.

Because tied to the handle of the box with a piece of baling twine was a small envelope with Mae’s name on it — her name specifically, nobody else’s, in Vera’s handwriting.

Vera had known.

She had known, four months before her death, that Mae would be the one to find it.

Mae opened her envelope.

Inside was a note.

It said: Of course it was you, Mae. You’ve always paid attention. The combination is the year the Governor was planted. Ask your mother — she knows because I told her last summer and she kept it, which is the other reason I trusted her with this.

The combination was 1887.

The box opened.

Two hundred thousand dollars, in banded fifties, exactly as promised.

And underneath the money, one more envelope.

This one addressed to all six of us.

It contained a single sentence: Now put it to something that lasts longer than money.

We have been arguing about what that means ever since.

Productively, I think.

Vera would probably say that was the point too.