The Feed Store Reva Left Me

I was in that store six days a week for a decade. Ferlin was in it maybe three.

When Reva got her diagnosis fourteen months ago, pancreatic, the kind of thing the doctor in Springfield did not dress up with much hope, I was the one who drove her to every appointment, because Ferlin said his schedule did not allow it and I never once believed that was true. I sat with her through four rounds of chemo in a recliner at the cancer center, held the little pink basin when she needed it, and drove her home afterward while she slept against the window with her wig slightly crooked and her hand resting on my knee like she needed to know I was still there. I moved into her spare room the last six weeks so she would not be alone at night. Ferlin visited on Sundays, usually for under an hour, usually with an excuse ready before he had even taken his coat off.

I remember one night in particular, the third week of that final stretch, when Reva woke up gasping and convinced for a few terrible minutes that she was back in 1987, standing in the burned-out shell of the original store the night the wiring caught fire. I sat on the edge of her bed and talked her back to the present the way you would talk down a spooked horse, telling her the store was standing, that Wendell Pruitt had already called that morning about a load of fence posts, that the register still rang the same crooked bell it always had. She finally settled, gripped my wrist hard enough to leave a mark, and said, “You’re the only one who knows how to bring me back anymore.” I did not tell Ferlin about that night. I am not sure he would have understood what it cost either of us.