The Feed Store Reva Left Me

I repainted the sign that spring. It still says Dorsett Feed and Grain, because that name means something on that stretch of highway that I was not about to erase, and because it was Reva’s name before it was ever anybody’s trouble. I added one line underneath, small, in the same green as the original, that says “Est. 1961, Reva’s Store.” I did it without asking anyone’s permission, because for the first time in a long time, I did not need to.

I visit her grave out at the little cemetery behind the Methodist church most Sunday afternoons, usually with a coffee from the diner on the square, and I tell her how the numbers are running, the way I used to tell her on our drives home from Springfield. I tell her Wendell Pruitt’s grandson started coming in for his own seed corn this spring, third generation of that family to walk through our door. I tell her the roof on the west warehouse held through the last bad storm. She would want the ledger news before anything else. She always did.

I still drive past the Methodist church on Cedar Street where I married a man I no longer know, and I do not feel much of anything when I do, which I have decided is its own kind of healing. What I feel instead is on Saturday mornings, when I unlock the front door at six, flip the sign to open, and watch old Wendell Pruitt back his truck up to the loading dock the same way he has for forty years, and I think about a woman who prayed for a daughter and got one through a different door, and who made sure that when her son finally showed me exactly who he was, I would not be the one left standing in the parking lot with nothing.

I was the one left standing behind the counter, in a store with my name on the paperwork and my hands on the ledger, and some mornings that feels like the truest kind of inheritance there is.