The Widow Who Planted Across the Road
I had kept the books for Engel Brothers for twenty years. Every check, every seed invoice, every operating note and every land payment came across my kitchen table.
I knew that partnership agreement better than Randy did, and I knew it better than Scott, who had not read it since the day he signed it.
The agreement said that if a partner died, the remaining partners could buy out his share from his spouse, at a price set by the formula in the agreement and an appraisal of the land and the equipment.
It said the house on the home place belonged to the partnership, because their dad had built it with partnership money in 1979. Jeff had signed it. I had been sitting beside him when he signed it, holding Abby on my lap.
I had run the formula myself, the night after the funeral, at two in the morning when I could not sleep. It came out to a little under five hundred thousand. They had rounded up.
So the price was fair. The paper was legal. Jeff had agreed to every word of it with his own pen. There was nothing to take to anybody, and nobody to call.
The only thing wrong with it was the timing, and you cannot sue a man for handing you a check at a funeral.
I also knew something they did not know I knew. I had seen the letters from the bank in January.
Two bad years of dry summers had left the partnership’s operating line stretched thin, and the new loan officer wanted the balance sheet cleaned up before he would renew.
A widow holding a third of the partnership was a loose end on a balance sheet.
I put the envelope in my purse and closed the clasp. “All right,” I said.
Randy let out a breath. He looked relieved. That was the part that stayed with me later, lying awake. Not the check. The relief on his face, like he had been dreading a scene and was grateful I had not made one.
“We just thought a clean break would be easier on you,” he said. “No hanging on. No worrying about the bank or the markets.”
“I understand,” I said, and I did. I understood exactly. Then I got up and went to sit with my daughter.
That night at home, Abby sat at the kitchen table in her funeral dress and asked me if we were going to live with Aunt Pam in Hastings now.
Pam is my sister. Somebody at the lunch had already said it in front of her, the way people do.
“I don’t know yet, honey,” I told her. “I haven’t decided anything.”
“Do we have to leave the house?”
I could have lied. I thought about it. But she was twelve, and she was a farm kid, and farm kids can smell a lie the way they can smell rain coming.
“Yes,” I said. “The house belongs to the farm, and the farm belongs to Uncle Randy and Uncle Scott now. They paid us for Dad’s part.”
She thought about that for a long time. Then she said, “But Dad’s fields are still here.”
“They are.”