The Feed Store Reva Left Me

*

I wish I could tell you that I felt something clean and simple in that moment, like the satisfaction people imagine when a wrong finally gets set right. Mostly what I felt was tired, the particular tiredness that comes after carrying something heavy for a very long time and finally being allowed to set it down.

Ferlin did not come home that night. He did not come home the next night either. Two days later he sent a text asking if we could talk, and I told him there was nothing left to talk about that a lawyer could not say better, and I filed for divorce nine days after that, citing adultery, because Missouri lets you and because Reva had left me the paperwork proving it in an envelope inside the folder Harold handed me on the way out of his office, a printed photograph from that diner in Bolivar, dated, with a note in her handwriting on the back that said “for when you need it, not before.”

Faustina moved back to Bolivar with the baby a month later. I heard through the grapevine, the way you hear everything in a town of two thousand people, that Ferlin took a job managing a parts counter at a tractor dealership outside Springfield and that the arrangement with Faustina did not survive the winter, once the truck he’d been left turned out to be the only thing keeping either of them financially afloat while the divorce worked its way through the courts. I did not celebrate that. I will admit I did not grieve it either.

I kept the store.

I want to be clear about what that meant, because it was not simply money, though the money mattered plenty. It meant the Tuesday morning regulars who had been coming in for cracked corn and rabbit pellets since before I was born kept a place to come. It meant the Hendersons, three weeks behind on their account because their oldest had needed surgery, kept getting their feed without a word said about it, the way Reva had taught me. It meant the two part time employees Reva had kept on payroll through her illness, a widow named Opal who ran the register on weekends and a nineteen year old named Tobias saving for junior college, kept their jobs.