The Feed Store Reva Left Me

It was during those last six weeks, in the dark of her bedroom at two in the morning, that Reva first told me she knew about Faustina.

I had not told her. I had barely let myself know it myself, though I had suspected for the better part of a year, the way a wife suspects things she is too tired and too scared to confirm. Reva told me she had seen them together at a diner in Bolivar in the spring, before her diagnosis, holding hands across a table like people who had stopped being careful. She told me she had said nothing to Ferlin because she wanted to see if he would come to it on his own, if he had enough of his father’s decency left in him to end it honestly instead of just getting caught. She told me, gripping my hand with fingers that had gone thin and papery from the chemo, that she was watching, and that whatever he chose to do with the time she had left, she was going to make sure it did not cost me everything I had built.

I did not fully understand what she meant by that until I was sitting across a conference table from her son three weeks after her funeral.

*

Harold laid the folder on the table and cleared his throat. Ferlin leaned back in his chair with the particular ease of a man who believes the hard part of his life is already behind him. Faustina adjusted the baby against her shoulder and looked, for the first time since I had walked in, a little less certain of herself.

“Reva signed her final will in March,” Harold said. “She also left a personal letter to be read into the record before we go over the distribution.”

Ferlin barely reacted. I sat with my hands folded in my lap, trying not to fall apart in front of the two people who seemed to have rehearsed every part of this except the ending.