Two Christmases ago, Grandma sat all of us down in her living room and told us plainly what she wanted. When she was gone, the place would come to the seven of us, even shares, a seventh apiece.
She said it the way she said grace, like it was already settled with God and she was only letting us know.
Clyde was sitting in the corner that Christmas in his good shirt. I remember he looked at the carpet the whole time she talked. I remember thinking he looked tired. I did not think about it any harder than that.
That night in June, I drove home with the bill and the paper on the passenger seat and parked in our driveway outside Weatherford and sat there with the engine running for a while.
My husband, Quinn, is a lineman for the electric co-op. He came out on the porch in his sock feet because he heard the car and didn’t hear the door.
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“You going to sit out there all night?” he called.
I brought both papers in and put them on our kitchen table under the light. He read the bill twice, slowly, the way he reads a work order. Then he read the one-page agreement and set it face down.
“Is a survey even real money?” I asked him. “Fourteen thousand dollars?”
“For three hundred acres cut into seven tracts, with corners and a plat? Yeah,” he said. “A buddy of mine paid eight for a lot less ground out by Hydro. That part’s real. Clyde didn’t make up the bill.”
“Then what part isn’t real?”
Quinn tapped the face-down paper. “This. You can’t sell him something you don’t own. Your grandma owns every inch of that place. Nobody owns a seventh of anything until she’s gone, and she’s not going anywhere.”
“So I don’t have to pay him.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “But think about what happens if you don’t.”
I already had been thinking about it, the whole drive home. If I refused, Clyde would carry that story to every cousin and probably to Grandma’s hospital bed too. Bethany wouldn’t pay. Bethany doesn’t care about the place.
And if I went to Grandma, I would be the one pulling an eighty-seven-year-old woman with a healing hip into a fight between her oldest son and her granddaughter. I had watched her wince just lifting her foot onto the walker.
Grandma still owned every acre. There was nothing of mine to fight over yet. The only thing I could actually lose was my place at the table, and two thousand dollars was cheaper than that.
“We could pay it out of the truck fund,” I said.
Quinn rubbed his face. That fund was supposed to replace his pickup, which has 280,000 miles on it and a passenger door that only opens from the inside.
“He’s scared of something,” Quinn said. “A man doesn’t spend fourteen thousand dollars of his own money to be mean. He spends it because he’s scared.”
“He’s greedy,” I said.
“Maybe,” Quinn said. “But I’ve worked beside Clyde at your grandma’s. He doesn’t buy new boots until the old ones split. That’s not a greedy man. Pay it. Then find out what he’s scared of.”
I wrote the check the next morning before work. I didn’t mail it. I’m a mail carrier, and I wanted to see his face, so I drove it out to his place on my lunch break with the route only half run.