The Feed Store Reva Left Me

Faustina had gone very quiet. She was looking at Ferlin now, not at Harold, not at me, waiting for him to say something that would make this make sense, and he had nothing to give her.

“To the child,” Harold read, and here his voice softened, “who did not choose the circumstances of his birth and should never be made to pay for them, I leave a trust of twenty thousand dollars, to be held for his education, because a baby is a baby, whatever mess the grown people around him have made.”

The room had gone so quiet I could hear the wall clock ticking.

“That’s it?” Faustina finally said, her voice small. “A truck?”

“That’s it,” Harold said, not unkindly.

Ferlin looked at me then, really looked at me, for the first time since I had walked through that door. Whatever he saw on my face was not triumph. I want to be honest about that. It was closer to grief, the particular kind that comes from watching something confirmed that you had spent a year hoping was not true.

“She can’t do this,” Ferlin said, finally finding his voice, though it came out thinner than I had ever heard it. “That store is half mine. I’m her son.”

“She could, and she did,” Harold said. “It’s an outright bequest, properly witnessed, and I’d know, because I drew it up myself in April, the week after she asked me a question I won’t forget. She asked me whether a person could leave a business to someone who wasn’t blood if that person had done more to earn it than the blood relative had. I told her the law didn’t care about blood. It cared about whose name was on the deed. She said good, write it that way.”