The Feed Store Reva Left Me

It meant something else too, something I did not expect. The first Saturday after the will reading, half the town seemed to find a reason to stop by the store. Nobody said much about what had happened, because nobody needed to, everybody in Cedar Hollow already knew by then, the way everybody always knows everything, but they bought their feed and their fence posts and their garden seed and they told me, one after another, in the plain unshowy way people talk in small towns, that Reva had done right, and that they were glad the store was staying in good hands.

Opal cried the morning I told her the store was not closing, right there behind the register, and then apologized for crying and rang up a bag of scratch grain like nothing had happened, because that is how women her age were raised to handle feeling something in public. Tobias asked if the job offer for the summer still stood, and when I told him it did, and that there would be a raise in it besides, he grinned so wide I had to look away for a second so he would not see me getting emotional over a nineteen year old’s summer paycheck. Word moves fast in a town of two thousand people, and by the following Sunday, three different women had stopped me after church, not to gossip, though I am sure plenty of that happened elsewhere, but to tell me quietly that Reva had told each of them, separately, over the last year, that I was the daughter she should have had from the start.