The Feed Store Reva Left Me

I did not expect to find my husband’s girlfriend nursing a newborn in the waiting room of a law office in my own hometown, and I certainly did not expect Ferlin to sit down beside her the way a man sits down next to his wife.

Two weeks after we buried Reva Dorsett, I drove the eleven miles from our house to Cobb and Whitfield on the square in Cedar Hollow wearing the same black dress I had worn to the funeral, because it was the only black dress I owned and grief does not care about wardrobe variety. I had barely slept. I had spent the two weeks since the funeral running the feed store alone, opening at six, closing at seven, telling every farmer who came through the door that yes, we were still open, yes, the Dorsett family still stood behind every bag of feed with our name on it, even though the only Dorsett who had shown up to help me carry fifty pound sacks in the Missouri heat was me, and I was not born a Dorsett at all.

I pushed open the glass door of the law office and there they were.

Faustina Lark sat in one of the two waiting chairs with a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket against her chest, rocking him with the easy competence of a woman who had done this before, or who had at least had nine months to practice. She looked up at me and did not look away, which told me everything about how this appointment had been explained to her. Ferlin sat beside her, one arm resting along the back of her chair, and when the door chimed he glanced at me the way you glance at a slow cashier. Mild irritation. Nothing more.

“You brought the baby,” I said, because it was the only sentence my mouth could locate.

“He’s three weeks old,” Faustina said, like that settled something. “I wasn’t going to leave him with a sitter for this.”