The Store My Husband Thought Was His

Wade was handsome and quick and funny, and my dad was polite to him for nineteen years and never once warm. I resented it back then. I thought it was an old man being stubborn. I understand now that my father was doing the one thing a father can still do for a grown daughter, which is to build a wall around the thing she will need if the worst happens, and never make her feel the wall is there.

Because here is what my father did, quietly, with his lawyer Diane Prewitt, years before he died. He never put the store, the land under it, or our house on Poplar Street into anything Wade could touch. When he handed the business down, he did not hand it to Wade and me. He put it in an irrevocable trust in my name only, with Diane as the adviser, and he had me sign it at her office on a Tuesday while Wade was out on his route. I did not think much of it at the time. My dad said it was “for the taxes” and “to keep the McCallister family from getting ideas,” and I signed where she pointed. The house too. The little bit of land. Even the small brokerage account my mother left, the closest thing our family had to real money, maybe enough to matter but nothing anyone would call rich.

Wade knew we had the store. Wade knew we had the house free and clear and the land and a modest nest egg my dad had been careful with. What Wade did not know, or never bothered to learn, or maybe assumed the law would fix for him someday, was that not one square foot of any of it had his name anywhere near it. In his head, we were half-and-half. In his head, when the day came, he would walk out with half of everything my father spent fifty years building.

He built his whole future on a number that was not real. I did not know that yet, standing at the back of the exhibition hall. But he had.

The Morning I Was Never Supposed To Be There

The morning of the farm show, a load of hog feed and mineral tubs that I had promised to four different producers did not come off the mill truck because the mill truck never came. The supplier, a big outfit two hours south, had a driver quit and a dispatch mess, and my phone started ringing at 5:40 in the morning with men who needed feed by afternoon or they would be in trouble.

I called the supplier’s rep and got voicemail. I called the plant and got a kid who could not help me. And then I remembered that the supplier always had a booth at the Tri-County Farm Show over in Calloway County, and that their regional manager, a decent man named Fred, worked that booth every year shaking hands. So I did what my father would have done. I got in the truck at seven, drove the two hours, and went to look Fred in the eye and get my feed unstuck.

I told Wade none of this, because Wade was not home. Wade had told me the night before that he was driving up to Salina for a two-day distributor meeting and would not be back until Thursday. He said it while he packed a bag, and he kissed me on the forehead, and he said, “Get some rest, you’ve been running yourself ragged.” He even texted me from the road that morning. I have the text still. It says, “Made it to Salina, meetings all day, love you.” I texted back, “Drive safe. Love you.” I meant it. I was a woman who meant it.

Salina is northwest of us. The Tri-County Farm Show is southeast, in the other direction entirely, in Calloway County, at the fairgrounds. There was no earthly reason for Wade to be at that farm show. And that, I think, is why he was there. Because there was no reason. Because two counties away, at a show he had no route reason to attend, with a woman half his age, my husband believed with all his heart that he was invisible.