The Movers They Sent To My Farm

My name is Lettie Gormley, and the week I graduated college, I drove straight from the ceremony to a lawyer’s office on the square in Hazel Green instead of to the party my mother was throwing in my honor. I still had the tassel in my bag. I signed papers for three hours instead of eating cake, and by the time I walked out, the farm my grandparents had spent fifty years building no longer had my name on a single piece of paper. It had my name on all of it, technically, but not in any way my mother or my brother could reach. That decision is the only reason I still have a home to tell you about.

I need to back up, because none of this makes sense unless you understand what my grandparents were to me. My mother, Maribel, was raised on that farm outside Hazel Green and could not wait to leave it. She married young, moved us forty minutes away to a subdivision with a homeowners association and a name like Cedar Bend Estates, and treated every trip back out to the farm like a chore she was doing my grandparents a favor by showing up for. My older brother, Kelso, was the one she built the whole household around. Kelso got the better bedroom, the car at sixteen, the benefit of every doubt when a teacher called home. I got told to be grateful and to stop expecting things to be fair, because fair was not a word my mother used unless it worked in Kelso’s favor.