Chapter 7: Depositions
Vanessa was deposed on a Wednesday and treated the oath like a suggestion.
She said Grandmother had wanted her to have “seed money for youth.” She could not explain why seed money required Grandmother’s confusion or a jewelry box emptied before the funeral ham was cold. When Ruth played a portion of the kitchen video—Grandmother naming Vanessa’s pressure about “loans that weren’t loans”—Vanessa cried without an audience for the first time I could remember. Crying is not a ledger entry. The canceled checks remained.
My mother’s deposition was smoother and worse. She spoke about filial duty, about the burden of a difficult old woman, about my “obsession with paper.” Ruth asked whether filial duty included sending flowers with the price tag attached while her daughter changed soiled sheets. Mother’s attorney objected to tone. The question sat in the transcript anyway.
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My father arrived with the confidence of a man who had moved numbers for decades and assumed his daughter’s federal badge was decorative. Under oath he called the transfers gifts. Ruth asked for gift tax returns. He discovered an interest in water. We broke twice. After the second break his answers shortened into the kind of grit that means the walls are moving in.
I was deposed too—care logs, timelines, how I found the safe, why I had not called the police on night one. I said evidence without copies is a scene; I am not paid to make scenes. The other side tried to paint me as a vulture with a calculator. I described six months of night feeds and the eleven-minute visit. The calculator image wobbled.
