Your Honor, I’ve never met that man. I signed a blank page in a break room. Then she said she’d been twenty-five and eleven days into the job, that her supervisor had put two pages in front of her with the top folded over and told her it was a formality, and that she’d asked once what it was and been told not to worry about it. She said she’d looked up my father’s name that August and found the obituary and had been sick about it ever since.
The second witness came in the following morning and said essentially the opposite for about six minutes, and then, under cross, said he didn’t recall the date, didn’t recall the room, and didn’t recall whether my father had been present. My attorney asked him whether a man in a wheelchair on oxygen would have been memorable. He said he’d like to speak with his own lawyer. The judge granted a continuance and the tone in that room changed completely between one sentence and the next.
The amendment was struck in February. The 2016 will stands — the farm split between me and my sister, the equipment to my cousin, and nothing whatsoever to the man who employed both witnesses. There’s a referral out of the probate court to the prosecutor’s office that I had no part in requesting and no ability to withdraw, which I have explained to four relatives now.
My uncle called in March to tell me I’d destroyed the family over a piece of land. I told him I’d spent nine dollars on a public database and everything after that had been done by other people. He said that wasn’t the point. It never is. My sister and I put the first hay up ourselves in June, badly, and sat on the tailgate afterward and split a thermos, and I thought about a twenty-five-year-old in a break room being handed a folded page and told not to worry about it.
