Hollis came on the third Saturday of October. The wheat was in the ground, green and thin and new, and the cottonwoods along the creek had turned the color of old coins. He stood in the yard a while looking at the barn and the machine shed, the way a man looks at a place that is not his and has always been his.
Dorene was out working the cows on the south pasture. I had asked her to stay out of the house for the first hour. I could not have told you why.
I made coffee. I set out a pan of cinnamon rolls. We sat at the kitchen table, the same one, with the sun coming across the oilcloth and the register in the floor above us.
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He wrapped both hands around his cup and did not drink. He was nearly fifty, with gray coming in at his temples, and I thought, there he is, my boy.
“Mama,” he said. “First thing. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For doing what you did.” His voice was thick. “I need to say something, and I need you to let me get all the way through it, because I’ve been practicing it for twenty years, and if I stop, I won’t start again.”
I put down my cup. “Go on.”
“I knew you were praying for me to come home,” he said. “I knew it every Sunday on the phone. You’d ask about my work, and then you’d go quiet, and I knew what you were asking God. It was like being loved by a prayer. I’d lie awake in Phoenix and think, she’s down there every morning asking for something I can’t give her.”
“Hollis.”
“Let me finish. Please.” He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “I prayed too. Every night. I prayed the opposite. I prayed, God, please make her stop. And I felt like a thief every time, because how do you ask God to take away your mother’s hope?” He laughed, a short wet laugh. “So we’ve been praying at each other across a thousand miles, you and me, asking God for opposite things. And He’s been sitting in the middle of it, holding the answer we both needed. And He sent Dorene.”
I could not say a word.
“I would have signed away every acre twenty years ago, Mama, if you’d asked me. I never wanted it. I never said so, because it would have broken your heart, and Daddy’s. But Dorene wanted it. I’ve always known. I used to watch her in the field. She looks at that land like it’s a person.”
Then he reached into his jacket pocket and took out an envelope.
It was plain and white, soft at the edges, worn from a long time in a pocket. My husband’s handwriting was on it. Just one word, in his square blunt hand: Hollis.
“Dad wrote me this,” he said. “Four years ago, after the first scare with his heart, the one he never told you about. He told me not to give it to you. He said, ‘Don’t hand it to her, son. Your mother has to get there walking.’ I’ve carried it in my wallet for four years. I’ve had it out on the phone with you a hundred times, Mama. I have never once been able to do it.”
He slid it across the table.
My hand shook when I took it. I opened the flap and took out one sheet of lined paper torn from a feed-store tablet, and I read my husband’s handwriting for the first time since he died.