Ardell handed me the accounting at the end of Mom’s lane, standing beside his car with the engine still running, like it was a policy renewal he needed signed before lunch.
It was the third Saturday of September. I had been at the farm since seven that morning, and my jeans were gray to the knee with dust from the machine shed.
“It’s just the interim,” he said. “The lawyer wants us both to see it before the auction. Nothing you need to do. Just look it over.”
I looked it over right there by the mailbox, with the beans turning brown in the field across the road and a grain truck rattling past toward the elevator in Roanoke.
Most of it was what I expected. The funeral home. The headstone deposit. The lawyer’s retainer. Two months of electric to keep the well pump running and the furnace from freezing.
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Then, near the bottom, in the same neat typeface as everything else, one line: “Clean-out and estate labor, executor, $23,000.”
I read it twice. I read it a third time, because I thought maybe there was a decimal point hiding somewhere I had missed.
“Ardell,” I said, “what is this?”
He leaned over to see where my finger was. “That’s my fee. The executor’s fee. It’s allowed, Ang. The lawyer said it’s standard. Denise looked it up too.”
“Clean-out,” I said. “It says clean-out.”
“Well, it covers everything. Getting the house ready. Getting the estate ready. It’s all one job.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got Logan’s game at two. Just look it over and call me if you have questions.”
He got back in his car. He backed out onto the gravel, waved through the windshield, and drove off toward the blacktop and Peoria, forty minutes away.
I stood at the mailbox a long time. Then I folded the paper in thirds, put it in the pocket of my fleece, and walked back up the lane to finish the shed.
March
Mom died on the ninth of March, on a Sunday, in the recliner by the south window where she could watch the bird feeder. She was eighty-one. Lois Bauer found her when she came by with the church bulletin.
She had lived alone on that farm for eleven years after Dad passed. She kept the house, kept the garden, kept the feeders full, and rented the ground to the Ackermans on a cash lease.
Her will was short and plain. Everything split down the middle between Ardell and me. Ardell was named executor, because he was the oldest and because he was, as Mom always said, “good with paper.”
That was true. Ardell has sold insurance in Peoria for twenty-four years. He has a desk, a secretary, a wife named Denise who does the books, and two boys in high school who play everything.
I am the one who stayed. I live in Eureka, twelve miles from the farm, and I work the front counter at the county extension office, answering questions about soil tests and 4-H fair entries and what is eating somebody’s tomatoes.
I have been divorced six years. My daughter, Megan, is fifteen. She is the reason I could not take a week off and just do it all at once. She is also the reason I could not stop.
Because the house was the house she had grown up visiting. Every Sunday dinner. Every Easter egg hunt in the grove. Every summer week when I worked and Grandma watched her shell peas on the porch steps.
At the funeral lunch in the church basement, Ardell stood with me by the coffee urn and said what we both already knew.
“We’ll have to sell it all. The house, the stuff. I’ll handle the legal side. You’re closer, so maybe you can get a start on the house when you have time.”
“When I have time,” I said.
“Whenever,” he said. “No rush. The lawyer says probate takes six months minimum anyway.”