He read it out loud. Then he read the flight number, and the departure time, and the seat, because my attorney asked him for all three and the judge let her have them. Then she asked whether he’d been in Cleveland at two-fifteen that afternoon or in seat 14C at thirty thousand feet, and he said he must have been mistaken about which day it was, and she said she had no further questions, and sat down.
She didn’t need him to admit anything. That’s the thing I hadn’t understood going in — the case wasn’t about proving he lied, it was about the will requiring three witnesses and now having two, both of whom are the second wife’s family, one of whom cried on the stand the following morning and said she’d signed a stack of papers at a kitchen table in Florida in April and had never been in any lawyer’s office in her life.
The 2021 will was denied admission in December. The prior one from 2009 governs, which was drawn when my mother was alive and leaves things roughly the way two people had agreed on when they still had a plan. It is not a windfall. It’s about a third of what the estate was in 2009 and there are questions about where the rest went that my attorney says will take another two years and may not be worth chasing.
My father kept everything. Every boarding pass, every receipt, every service record for a car he sold in 1998, in banker’s boxes in a basement, and I spent eleven weekends down there because I couldn’t sleep and it was something to do with my hands. I found the boarding pass in a folder labeled TAX 2021 between a dentist’s bill and a parking stub. He hadn’t kept it for a reason. He kept everything for no reason at all, for fifty years, and it turned out to be the only reason any of this came apart.
