The Service We Held at the Sale Barn
No Sheriff Was Coming
Here is the part Dewey could not have known to tell me. We pieced it together over the next week.
We got it from the funeral home, the church secretary, and a cousin of Charlene’s who felt bad enough to talk to me.
My father had a term life policy worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Charlene was the named beneficiary.
She had been named on it for years. Back when naming your wife was just the ordinary thing a decent man did.
My father never changed it, because changing it never crossed his mind. Why would it. He trusted her.
When he died, that money was hers. Legally. Cleanly. No argument anybody could make.
The policy pays who it names. It named her. That is the whole of it.
I called a lawyer in Warrensburg two days later. He was a straight shooter and he charged me nothing to tell me the truth.
The truth was there was no case. “She was his wife,” he said.
“Under Missouri law a spouse is next of kin. Next of kin controls the funeral, the burial, the obituary, all of it.”
She did not have to tell us. She did not have to name us. She did not have to let us stand at the grave.
None of it broke a single law. That was the hardest thing to swallow.
The cruelest thing she did was also the most legal. There was no crime in it anywhere.
The lawyer leaned back and looked at me. “You could spend twenty thousand dollars and two years dragging her through court.”
“You would lose. And even if you won a dollar, you would have spent your father’s memory on lawyers.”
Then he said the thing I have turned over a hundred times since. “You can’t buy back a funeral you missed. Don’t throw good years after it.”
So that was the wall. No sheriff was coming. No judge was going to stand my father up and call his sons to the front pew.
The law was on Charlene’s side, and she knew it. She had used the eleven days of our not-knowing well.
She got him in the ground and the money in the bank before we could say one word. We were never going to beat her in a courtroom.