My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.

I do not know what to do with that. I have never known what to do with it.

A woman of eighty-five decided, with full information, that she would rather have her son at her table on a Sunday than have the conversation — and then she made absolutely certain that the conversation would happen anyway, three years later, in a room she would not be in.

PART 4

Now the part that decided the case, and it is not the JAG file.

I refused to write my grandmother's will.

In the January, about six weeks after that telephone call, she rang again and asked whether I could do it for her, since I did that sort of thing.

I said no.

I said no immediately and I said it twice, because she pushed, because she was eighty-seven and did not see why a granddaughter who drafts wills all day could not draft hers.