The Dispatch Log My Mother Forgot
After
My mother did not speak to me on the courthouse steps. She went past me fast with her chin up, the way she goes past things she has decided not to see, and she got in the car and she waited. My father stopped.
He stood on the step below me, so for once we were nearly the same height, and he looked at me, and I saw that his eyes were wet, and I felt nothing for it, because a man’s tears at the bottom of the courthouse steps are not worth much when he gave his name to a lie at seven fifty-one that morning.
“Nora,” he said. “It got away from us.”
“No, Dad,” I said. “It didn’t get away from you. You picked up the phone. You told a stranger I was dangerous. You did that on purpose, this morning, with your coffee, so I’d miss it. Nothing got away from anybody. You just got caught.”
He did not have anything to say to that. He went and got in the car with my mother, and they drove away, and I stood on the steps of the courthouse where my grandmother had gotten married in 1961 and I let myself cry, finally, the whole way down.
Here is where the story turns, if you want to call it turning. It turned exactly the way my grandfather would have wanted it to.
The county attorney did review the report. It took a few months. In the end my mother pleaded to a charge of filing a false report and interfering with a proceeding, and my father to a lesser count for his part in it. They did not go to jail. They paid a fine and they did community service, my mother at the very food pantry in the church basement where she had spent eighteen months telling the ladies I was a manipulator, which I think bothered her more than any jail cell would have. There is a kind of justice in a small town that no court could design.
And their will contest was over. There was nothing left to appeal, nothing left to file, no lawyer in the world who would take a case built on the very morning they got charged for. The farm was mine, free and clear, the way my grandfather decided it with a clear head and a full heart.