The Farm My Father Left Me

The folder and the blue pen

I came down the back stairs a little after eight, and the whole scene was already set for me.

They were waiting in the kitchen. There was a cinnamon roll on a plate on the table, a store one, still in its plastic clamshell with a candle nobody had lit stuck in the middle of it, as if sugar could soften what was about to happen. Next to the plate sat a thick manila folder. Next to the folder, dead center, laid out like the main event, was a cheap blue pen.

My mother turned around from the counter with her good hostess smile on. “There’s the birthday girl,” she said. “Happy birthday, sweetheart. Sit down, we’ve got some things to take care of.”

Dale was at the head of the table, my father’s chair, with his coffee and his folio and the look of a man who had already spent the money. Kayla was on the bench along the wall, phone in her hand, watching me the way you watch a movie you already know the ending of. She had a little smile too. She was, I found out later, picturing the storefront. The photographer. The whole life she was sure my father’s ground was about to buy her.

“Now,” my mother said, sitting down beside me and sliding the folder over, “we talked about this. We’re just going to get the paperwork out of the way so the family’s all set up right, and then we can celebrate. Dale had it all done up nice and professional. You don’t have to read every word, it’s just legal language, it puts everything together the way it should be.”

Dale tapped the folder. “Sign wherever you see the little tabs,” he said. “Your mother and I will handle the rest. It’s how families protect what they’ve got, Nell. Your dad would have wanted it kept together.”

There were three yellow sign here tabs sticking out of the side of the folder.

I sat down. I pulled the folder in front of me. And I did the one thing they were not prepared for.

I opened it, and I started to read it. Slowly. Every line.

“Sweetheart, you don’t need to,” my mother started.

“I’d like to,” I said. “It’s a big decision. You always tell me I should take big decisions seriously.”

So I read. I turned each page while Kayla’s smile got a little tighter and Dale’s patience got a little thinner. It was the same forty two pages I had photographed in that same kitchen ten days before, formatted a little cleaner, my name typed into all the places where a signature was supposed to make everything theirs. I read it the way Walt read things, one finger down the page, in no hurry at all, while the cinnamon roll sat there with its unlit candle and the coffee went cold and the whole room waited for me to pick up the pen.

Finally, I closed the folder. I lined it up square with the edge of the table, the way I had put it back the last time.

I did not pick up the pen.