The question was: Whose name was on the gas account at 44 Bellwood between March 2019 and August 2023? My sister said she didn’t recall. My attorney asked whether she recalled paying it. She said she didn’t recall. Then my attorney put four years of statements in front of her with her own name on the top of every one, and asked whether a person who did not live in a house typically heats it for fifty-three consecutive months, and the judge said counsel in a tone that meant get to the point, and my attorney said she had no further questions.
Her lawyer asked for a recess. When they came back he asked to withdraw the petition entirely, and the judge said he’d take that up, but first he had a question of his own, and he asked my sister to explain the discrepancy. She said she’d misunderstood the question about the house. The judge said he was going to note the testimony in his order, and that word — note — is the whole reason the last eight months have gone the way they’ve gone.
She’d built the petition on our father dying alone and neglected while I supposedly did nothing four hundred miles away. That was the theory. It required her to be absent. She had four years of gas bills, a change-of-address filing, and a car registered at that address, and she swore she’d never been there, and none of it needed a private investigator — it needed a county website and about twenty minutes.
There’s a perjury referral. My cousin called in February to tell me she has three kids and asked what I wanted out of this. I said I didn’t want anything, that I hadn’t made the referral and couldn’t unmake it, and that she’d said it under oath with her hand up while I sat eleven feet away. The estate closed in June. I gave my share of the house proceeds to her children in a trust neither she nor I can touch until they’re twenty-five, and I did it through a lawyer, and I have never told her, and I’m not going to.
