The Ring on His Kitchen Floor

The woman with the folder

Then Brooke started coming around.

Brooke Voss was Harlan’s great-niece and the only blood he had left. She was thirty-one, down from Dallas in a white SUV that cost more than my house, and she sold land for a living. She wore a camel coat and a mustard-yellow silk scarf knotted at her throat, even when it was eighty degrees out, and she smiled with her whole face and none of her eyes.

She had not visited once in the six years I had known Harlan. Not for his birthday. Not for June’s anniversary. Not the winter he had pneumonia and I slept two nights in his recliner so he would not be alone. Then, that September, she started coming every other weekend.

The second Saturday in October, she came up Harlan’s porch steps with a manila folder while I was sitting on the top step, fixing a loose tread.

“Uncle Harlan, the developer in Amarillo will go to four point two million,” she said. “For all eleven hundred acres. There’s a lovely place in Amarillo with a nurse on every hall. You’d never have to worry about a thing again.”

Harlan did not even look at the folder.

“I don’t worry now,” he said.

“You can’t keep living out here alone.”

“I’m not alone,” he said. “This land goes to somebody who shows up.” And he pointed his crooked finger straight at me.

Brooke looked at me then. Not long. Just long enough. Her smile never moved, but something behind it did, like a door shutting somewhere in a house you thought was empty.

I laughed it off. I figured Harlan was being ornery. He liked to poke at people to see which way they would jump.

Brooke did not laugh. She tucked the folder under her arm, told her uncle she loved him, and drove away with her tires throwing gravel at the mailbox.