The Inheritance I Had Not Earned
“Keith,” I said. “I’m not going to argue with you about what the years were worth.”
He nodded, relieved, and I saw his shoulders come down an inch.
“I’ll ask one thing, and then I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me. Stay the weekend. Here, in the house. Your old room is made up, and Pop’s room is just as he left it, because the hospice people don’t come for the hospital bed until Monday. Go to church with me. And before you sign, read what’s in the bottom sideboard drawer, under the good tablecloth.”
He frowned. “What’s in the drawer?”
“Some notebooks. You can read them or not.”
“Sandy, I have a nine o’clock call Monday.”
“Keith,” Renee said quietly.
It was the only thing she said all afternoon, and she said it so softly I almost missed it. But my brother looked at his wife, and something crossed his face that I couldn’t read, and he put down the pen.
“Fine,” he said. “Two nights. Fine.”
At the door Pastor Dahl took my hand in both of his and pressed it, the way a man does when he wants you to know he has seen something.
“Galatians six, verse nine,” he said under his breath. “Don’t you grow weary.”
I told him I was too tired to be weary anymore, which was the truest thing I said that day. Then I went back in and started wrapping the ham.
I should tell you why I didn’t fight, because I’ve been asked, and the answer is not very noble.
The first reason is that I was worn out. When Pop died on Tuesday morning at ten past four, with my hand on his chest, the first thing I felt was not sorrow. It was silence. For six years that house had never been silent. A woman who cares for an old man at home also becomes very skilled at not defending herself, because a fight costs strength, and strength is the one thing you can’t spare.
But the real reason is that I knew Keith. My brother had never once been cruel to me on purpose. If he was wrong, and he was wrong, he was wrong out of ignorance, and ignorance is not cured by shouting. It is cured only by seeing. All I could do was put him in the house and let the house tell him.
I didn’t know if it would work. That night I knelt on the cold linoleum beside Pop’s empty hospital bed, my bad back complaining, and I did not pray for a bigger share. I prayed, Lord, if it’s yours to do, let him see it. And if it isn’t, let me bear it without getting bitter. Bitterness is a poison that looks like pride.
Then I got up, one hand on the bed rail, and lay down on the daybed beside it.
I owe you the shape of those years, since my brother did not know it either.
Our mother, Dorothy, died of cancer in 2015, and Pop did what a lot of widowed farmers do. He got smaller. He had sold the herd back in 1999, and he rented the forty acres to the Henderson boys and kept a garden and a seat at the Wednesday coffee table at the Kwik Trip. He was eighty-one the March he had his stroke. I found him on the porch steps at seven in the morning with one side of his face fallen and his coffee spilled across the boards, trying to say my name and getting out only the first letter.