My fathers cell phone started ringing in his pocket, and he stood up, because the petition I filed that morning at the Fulton County courthouse had been served, and the call was his lawyer, not mine.
For years my father controlled every story in that house, and I let him, because he said living there would save us all money. It saved him. This time the truth reached him through a process server, because Judge Morrison showed me my mothers will.
What the judge quietly let me see, knowing I was about to be a lawyer, was that my mother left her entire estate to me when she died, a substantial estate, and that my father had spent fourteen years administering it as if it were his, paying for the Buckhead house and my stepbrothers life with money that was legally mine.
The folder from the courthouse held the will, the probate file, and the accounting that showed where my mothers money had actually gone. And that morning, before my father ever touched the shredder, I filed a petition to compel an accounting of my mothers estate and to remove him as administrator.
He fed three hundred pages of my handwritten outlines through the shredder and told me lawyers think on their feet. He did not know I had already filed. He told me I would be back when I failed, and then his phone rang, and it was not me who needed to worry.
Sherri set down her wine and asked what I had done. I told her the truth: what my mother would have wanted.
I did not stay. I drove to a classmates place, and at eight the next morning I sat for the bar, three days of it, on what was in my head, because my father could shred my notes but not three years of law school. I passed.
I am sworn in now. The estate is in front of the probate court, and my father is accounting for fourteen years of my mothers money, line by line, on paper, where think on your feet does not help him.
My stepbrother Chase, of all people, called me after. He said he never knew the house was bought with my mothers money, and that he was sorry. I believe he did not know. Him I will talk to.
Lawyers think on their feet, my father said, shredding my outlines. This lawyer filed the petition first. And he stood up before his phone finished its first ring, because for once my mothers voice, in a will he hid for fourteen years, got the last word.