Marge — 10:15, cut only. D. waiting outside, wouldn’t come in. She asked me twice what we were signing. Ballpoint, in the margin, next to a ten-fifteen slot on a Tuesday in April 2021. My mother’s name, my brother’s initial, and eleven words that a hairdresser wrote down four years ago because something about that morning bothered her enough to note it and then bothered her enough that she never threw the book away.
She told my attorney the whole thing standing up, refusing a chair. My mother had come in with papers in her purse and asked her to sign as a witness at the shampoo bowl. She’d asked what it was. My mother said she wasn’t sure, that D. had explained it in the car. So she signed — she was clear about that, she wasn’t excusing herself — and then she wrote the note, and then she went home and told her husband about it, and he remembers that conversation too.
She’s testified twice. She is the single worst witness my brother’s attorney has ever had to face, because she has forty appointment books in a closet and she brought three of them, and she can produce the date my mother first came in confused about her own address, and the day she stopped being able to describe how she wanted her hair done. It’s a record of a woman’s decline written by somebody who touched her head every six weeks for thirty-four years.
The will’s in litigation and I’m told it will be another year. My brother has stopped coming to the county. What I keep returning to isn’t the fraud — it’s that my mother sat in that chair and asked a question out loud, twice, and the only person in her life who wrote the answer down was a hairdresser. I go every six weeks now. I don’t need my hair cut nearly that often. She knows exactly why I come, and she’s never said a word about it, and she always writes something in the margin.
