The Feed Store Reva Left Me

I came to Cedar Hollow twelve years ago as a twenty-four-year-old with a two year associate’s degree and a job answering phones at a trucking company outside Springfield. I met Ferlin at a wedding two counties over. He was easy to like back then, the kind of man who remembered your coffee order and made you laugh at your own family’s dysfunction. We married eleven months later in the little Methodist church on Cedar Street, and Reva stood in the receiving line afterward and told me, in front of both our families, that she had prayed for a daughter for forty years and God had finally sent one, just later than expected and through a different door.

Dorsett Feed and Grain had been Reva’s before it was ever the family’s. Her own father started it as a two-room operation selling seed corn out of a barn in 1961. Reva took it over at twenty-six when he died, ran it through three droughts, a fire, and a decade when the interstate almost killed every business on the square, and by the time I married into the family it was the only feed store left standing between Cedar Hollow and the county line, the place where every farmer within thirty miles bought their supplement, their fencing wire, their baby chicks every spring.

Ferlin worked there the way a man works somewhere his mother owns and he does not particularly want to be. He showed up late, left early, and spent most of his hours in the back office doing what he called “the numbers,” which mostly seemed to involve his phone. I started coming in on Saturdays to help during the spring rush, just to be useful, and I never really stopped. Within two years Reva had me running the front counter, then ordering, then payroll. She taught me how to read a soil report so I could recommend the right blend to a customer. She taught me which families were three weeks behind on their account because a husband was sick, and to let it ride without a word, because that was how Cedar Hollow took care of its own.