The Promise My Wife Made Me Keep

Then, on a Tuesday afternoon in November, the phone rang, and a man identified himself as a deputy with the Cooper County Sheriff’s Office.

“Mr. Ordway?” he said. “This is about a property you hold out on Blackwater Bend Road.”

My stomach dropped the way it does before you’ve even understood why.

“There’s a woman out there,” he said. “Living in the house on your land. She’s had some kind of medical episode, we’ve got an ambulance on scene now, and she’s asking for you. By name.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “There’s no house on that land. My wife always said it was just brush and river bottom, never developed.”

“Sir,” he said, gentle but firm the way lawmen get when they’ve done this call a hundred times, “I’m looking at a farmhouse with smoke coming out the chimney right now. I think you’d better come on out here.”

I do not remember getting my coat. I do not remember much of the fifty minute drive from Sedalia to Pilot Grove except the specific color of the sky, that flat gray Missouri gets in November right before it decides whether it’s going to rain or just stay miserable about it. I remember thinking Ursula had lied to me, not about something small, not about a Christmas present or a doctor’s appointment, but about something she had let me pay taxes on twice a year for over a decade while telling me it was empty ground.