He asked for a lawyer. Not immediately — first he looked at the receipt on the screen for a good while, a delivery slip for eleven bags of concrete he’d signed for in 2019, and then he said he wasn’t sure he understood the question, and then he said the word counsel out loud in a room where he had been called as somebody else’s witness. My brother turned around in his seat and looked at the door.
The examiner’s report was four pages. She’d found the receipt in the estate file — my father kept everything, that’s the only reason any of this exists — and she said the difference wasn’t subtle once you knew to look. Slant, pen pressure, the way the loops close. A right-handed man producing a left-handed signature on a document he intended to be able to walk away from. She said she’d seen it maybe six times in nineteen years and it always means the same thing: somebody who wanted to be paid and did not want to be caught.
He was granted a continuance and never came back. The second witness folded in about ten minutes the following month. The 2022 will was struck in March and the 2015 one stands, which splits everything between the four of us and leaves the farm to my sister because she’s the one who worked it.
My brother’s position now is that he was misled by a man he hired. Nobody believes it, including, I suspect, him. He’s stopped coming to anything and my mother has stopped mentioning his name at dinner, which is a form of grief I don’t have a word for yet. What I keep coming back to is that man at the table in 2022, sitting across from my father, deciding before he picked up the pen that he’d want a way out — and my father, who was eighty-eight and pleased to have company, offering him coffee.
