PART 4
Now the part that decided the case, and it is not the JAG file.
I refused to write my grandmother’s will.
In the January, about six weeks after that telephone call, she rang again and asked whether I could do it for her, since I did that sort of thing.
I said no.
I said no immediately and I said it twice, because she pushed, because she was eighty-seven and did not see why a granddaughter who drafts wills all day could not draft hers.
I told her that I could not, that if there was any chance I would be a beneficiary I must not be anywhere near the document, and that she needed a local attorney with no connection to this family whatsoever.
I gave her the two-sentence version of why, which is the version I have given to about four hundred soldiers: if the person who benefits is also the person who drafted it, then it does not matter how honest anybody was, because it will not survive a challenge.
She was annoyed with me.
She said something about how much money lawyers charge and something about how she supposed I was very busy, which is the specific weapon that generation carries, and she rang off.
I felt bad about that phone call for about a day and a half.
I want that in here, because there is a version of me in this account who is calm and correct and always ten moves ahead, and she does not exist. I hung up thinking that I had been rigid with an old woman about a technicality, and that I could have just done it and been careful, and that she was eighty-seven and had asked her granddaughter for a favour.
Almost every professional instinct I have was screaming and I very nearly overrode it because my grandmother was cross with me on a telephone.
That is how close it was.
That conversation is in writing.
Not because I recorded anything. Because two days later I emailed her Sowell Brink’s name and address and a short note saying I could not be involved and that she should go and see him.
Eleven lines. Sent on a Thursday in January.
Sowell Brink had that email in his file, because she had printed it and brought it to their first meeting, because she was eighty-seven and that is what you do with an email.
He also had his own attendance notes from three appointments, and a capacity assessment he had arranged himself with a physician who was not her own, because he is a careful man who has been doing this in Marrow County for thirty-one years.
That is what ended the undue influence claim.
Not my rank. Not the judge’s face. An email in which the beneficiary told the testator to go and find somebody else, sent fourteen months before the will was signed, printed out by an old woman and put in a folder.
Judge Ferro read that email out loud. All eleven lines of it.
There is one sentence in it that did the actual work, and it is not a clever sentence. I wrote it in about nine seconds on a Thursday morning between two appointments.
If I draft this, then whatever you decide will look like something I decided, and I am not going to do that to you.
Slaught’s only available answer to that was that I had written it precisely in order to be able to produce it later.
Judge Ferro asked him whether he was suggesting that a person had planned a fourteen-month evidential strategy in January of the previous year.
He said he was not suggesting that.
I watched my mother’s face while the email was being read out and I am not going to pretend I did not.
The claim was dismissed the same morning. Costs went against my parents, and Slaught’s bill was already in the region of thirty-one thousand dollars.
PART 5
I have not spoken to my father since.
That is not a stand I have taken. He has not called and I have not called and it has now been long enough that the not-calling has become its own arrangement.
My mother called eleven days after the hearing.
She did not apologise. What she wanted to talk about was the three hundred and forty thousand dollars — specifically, whether I intended to do anything about it, and whether it was really necessary to involve anybody, and how it would look for Dashiell’s business.
I told her that the estate’s executor is Sowell Brink and that it is not my decision, which is true, and that I would not be intervening in either direction, which is also true.
He did pursue it. It settled in the second year. I do not know the number and I have not asked.
Marigold, my sister, sent me a text about six months after the hearing that said: I didn’t know either. About the army. Nobody told me.
I believe her. That does not make it better and she knows it does not, and we speak now, about four times a year, carefully.
Dashiell has never contacted me.
I gave one point one million of it away in the first year, to a fund at Fort Weyland that pays for family emergency travel — the money that gets a private from a base to a hospital three states away when somebody is dying and there are eleven hours to do it in.
That is not a heroic figure. It is under a quarter of it and I mention it only because people ask and because I would rather say the number than let anybody imagine a better one.
I did not do it out of principle. I did it because I have signed off on nineteen of those travel requests personally and I have twice had to tell a twenty-two-year-old that the fund was empty that month.
The rest is where the rest is. I still live in the same apartment. I still drive the same car, which my sister finds insulting.
The rest is where the rest is and I am fine and it has changed almost nothing about how I live, which surprised me more than anything else in this entire account.
Now the suit.
The last thing my mother said to me, in the corridor after the hearing while people were still coming out of the courtroom, was not about the money.
She said: why didn’t you wear the uniform?
That is the only question either of my parents has ever asked me about my career and she asked it as an accusation, on a Tuesday morning, at sixty-six years old.
And I have had two years to work out the honest answer, and it is not the noble one.
The noble version is that I did not want to intimidate anybody, or that a courtroom is not a place for theatre, or that I have never once used the uniform for anything personal and was not going to start.
All of that is true and none of it is why.
I did not wear it because for thirty-eight years those two people built a version of me, and I let them, and by about twenty-five I had stopped correcting it out of something I told myself was dignity and which was actually a kind of hoarding.
I was keeping it. All of it — the commission, the eleven years, the nine hundred wills — in a closet, unmentioned, for a day when it would count.
That morning I stood in front of that closet for four minutes and I made a decision that I now understand was not strength.
I chose the cheap suit because I wanted to watch them walk all the way into it. I wanted it on the record. I wanted a stranger in a black robe to be the one who said it, out loud, in front of them, so that it could not be argued about afterwards at a kitchen table.
That is not restraint. That is thirty-eight years of wanting something, saved up and spent in one morning.
