Paulette — if you’re wearing my pearls in that courtroom, and I suspect you are, take them off and hand them to my granddaughter.
Page four.”
There was a final paragraph.
Judge Harmon read it more slowly.
“And Caroline.
You’ll be sitting there in a plain suit with your folders, not saying anything, because that’s what you do.
I know you’re not asking for this.
I know you’ll probably give half of it away to some fund.
Do it anyway.
Take the money.
Take the pearls.
And take the pantry door — I’ve told the lawyer.
Everything I ever wrote down about this family is on the inside of it.
You’re the only one who’ll read it right.”
The judge set the letter down.
Nobody moved.
The clerks did not type.
The bailiff, who had heard ten thousand letters, was looking at the floor.
Then my mother — who had spent four months telling everyone I’d manipulated a lonely old woman — turned in her chair, not to me, but to my father.
“Six hundred and four THOUSAND?”
“Paulette — ”
“You told me it was two hundred.
You told me the Scottsdale money was from the BUSINESS — ”
“Not here — ”
“She kept a TALLY, Roger.
On the pantry door.
Did you know she — ”
“Everybody’s mother keeps — ”
“You told me Caroline was the one who — ”
And there it was, in front of Judge Harmon, in front of Brett and Lindsay and the bailiff and Uncle Ray in the back: my parents, tearing into each other over six hundred and four thousand dollars, while a letter from a d*ad woman lay open on the bench and the pearls she’d asked for sat at my mother’s throat.
Judge Harmon let it go on for exactly as long as it needed to.
Then he tapped the bench once.
“Mrs. Ostrander.”
My mother stopped.
“Page four of the will, which your attorney presumably has, bequeaths a strand of pearls to the respondent.
I’d ask you not to leave this courtroom wearing an exhibit.”
She unclasped them.
Her hands were not steady.
She did not hand them to me.
She set them on the petitioners’ table, in front of Gil Farrow, and Gil Farrow — who had been practicing for thirty years and had, I think, just decided how he wanted to spend his last ten — picked them up, walked them across the aisle, and set them in front of me without a word.
“The petition is dismissed,” Judge Harmon said.
“With prejudice.
The will stands.
The court finds no evidence of undue influence, and considerable evidence of the opposite.”
“Petitioners are ordered to pay respondent’s costs.”
“Which,” he added, looking at me over his glasses, “I expect will be modest, since she represented herself.”
“Lieutenant Commander.”
“Your Honor.”
“Thank you for your service.
I mean that in the ordinary way.
