He put the group photograph on the screen himself and asked her to identify the woman third from the left. Her attorney tried to speak and the judge said he wasn’t taking argument, he was taking an answer. She said it was her. He asked whether she recalled the occasion. She said she’d attended a great many family functions over the years, and he said that was not the question he’d asked, and then the room was quiet for what felt like a very long time.
What she’d been trying to establish was that my grandmother had no meaningful relationship with me and that the 2019 will — the one leaving me the house on Ninth Street — was the product of undue influence by a granddaughter who’d appeared out of nowhere. It required a version of the last thirty years in which I was a stranger. She’d said it in a deposition, and then she said it again under oath, and my attorney let both go by without a word.
There were also letters. Forty-one of them, from my grandmother to me, spanning 1998 to 2018, and my aunt is mentioned by name in nineteen. My attorney filed those with the photographs. She told me afterward that the case had been winnable on the merits and that we’d have spent eighteen months and forty thousand dollars proving something a wedding album proved in one afternoon.
There’s a referral pending and I have no control over it and I’ve stopped apologizing for that to the four relatives who keep calling. The house is mine. I’ve been sleeping in my grandmother’s room since August and I still haven’t taken her handwriting off the kitchen calendar from 2019. The wedding album is on the shelf in the front room where she kept it. She’s in that group shot too — second from the right, not looking at the camera, watching me.
