The Captain Her Father Called A Costume

The Costume They Laughed At

My father laughed when I walked into the Caldwell County courthouse in my dress uniform at nine in the morning, and by the time the hearing ended he would not look at me at all.

I am Captain Erin Doyle. I am thirty eight years old. I have served twelve years in the Virginia Army National Guard, most of that time as a nurse attached to a medical company inside the 3rd Battalion, deployed twice to Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. None of that meant anything to my parents on the morning they sued me over my grandfather’s farm.

“Look at her,” my father said to my mother, not bothering to lower his voice. “All dressed up for the part.”

My mother laughed too, the small polite laugh she used at church potlucks when someone said something she did not actually find funny but wanted credit for tolerating.

I did not sit with them. I had not sat with them in a long time.

I found a seat on the plaintiff’s side, which felt strange, because in the paperwork my parents had filed, I was the one being accused. Ralph and Judy Doyle versus Erin Doyle. My own father and mother, suing their own daughter, over ninety two acres of pasture and hardwood outside Millbrook, Virginia, that had belonged to my grandfather Walter since before any of us were born.

They wanted the court to say I had abandoned that land. They wanted the will thrown out. And they wanted it thrown out by a judge who, as far as I knew, had never met either one of them before that morning.

I want to tell you exactly how we got there, because none of it started in that courtroom. It started a long time before that, in a family that had already decided who I was going to be before I ever got the chance to prove them wrong.