The Waiver My Husband Forgot He Signed

“Is this your signature, Mr. Quillen?”

Zebedee’s lawyer asked for a moment to confer with his client. They stepped into the hallway. When they came back four minutes later, Zebedee’s lawyer stood up and, in the flattest voice I have ever heard a person use, said his client did not dispute the authenticity of his signature.

That should have been the end of it. It nearly was. But Delphine wasn’t finished, because a waiver alone doesn’t answer for sworn statements or a folder of receipts, and she wanted the record to reflect exactly what those receipts were.

She had already sent a subpoena, weeks earlier, to the home improvement store two towns over listed on several of the receipts, requesting their actual sales records for the dates in question. The store’s manager confirmed, in writing, that the receipt for a full kitchen remodel dated that spring did not match any transaction in their system for that day, that the receipt template itself was an outdated format the store had stopped using four years before the date printed on it, and that no kitchen remodel materials of that scope had been sold to anyone named Quillen, ever.

As for Yetta’s eleven thousand dollar loan, Delphine simply asked her, under oath, to produce a bank statement showing the withdrawal. Yetta said she’d made the loan in cash. Delphine asked what year. Yetta said she couldn’t recall exactly. Delphine asked if perhaps it was easier to recall because it had never happened at all. Yetta’s lawyer objected, and Judge Whitfield sustained it, but by then it didn’t matter. I watched three jurors’ worth of doubt cross that judge’s face even though there was no jury, just him, and it was more than enough.