The Recording That Silenced My Brother

The courthouse in Cobb Corner smells like every courthouse I have ever been in, old paper and coffee that has been sitting on a burner since seven in the morning, and I sat at the respondent’s table with my hands flat on the wood in front of me because I did not trust them to stay still in my lap.

“Mr. Pettigrew transferred the deed to himself while our client was in a diminished state,” Cletis’s attorney told the judge, not even two minutes into the hearing. “We contend the deed to the property known as the Skillet diner is invalid and should be set aside, and that Bascom Pettigrew exercised undue influence over his grandmother in the final months of her life.”

I kept my eyes on the grain of the table. Not because the words surprised me. Because I had been waiting for them since the day I buried her.

My name is Bascom Pettigrew. I am forty-one years old, and I grew up three streets from the diner my grandmother, Goldia Pettigrew, ran on the corner of Route 9 and Cobb Corner’s main square for forty-three years. Everybody in three counties called it the Skillet, though the sign out front said Pettigrew’s Family Restaurant in letters that had faded to the color of weak tea by the time I was old enough to read them. My grandmother flipped eggs there six mornings a week from the time she was twenty-two until a stroke took the strength out of her right hand at seventy-nine, and even after that she sat on a stool by the register and told people how to run her kitchen until the week she died.

I want to tell you what it cost me to sit in that courtroom and listen to a lawyer I had never met use the word coerced about a woman who never once in her life let anybody coerce her into anything, because you will not understand what happened next unless you understand what came before it.