“Wade?”
I turned.
“I didn’t ask Dad for the farm,” he said.
“I know.”
“I had no idea he’d done this until Don called.”
“I believe you.”
Phil looked toward the pavement.
“I can’t understand why he’d leave everything this way.”
“Neither can I.”
He seemed about to say something else.
But he stopped.
Then he walked toward his car.
For months afterward, I remembered that moment.
Two brothers standing outside a lawyer’s office, both confused, both hurt, and neither willing to say what he was really thinking.
If either of us had spoken one more honest sentence that afternoon, we might have avoided four months of misery.
But we’d been raised by Albert Kucera.
And in our family, important things were rarely said aloud.
I drove to the farm that afternoon to collect my inheritance.
The feed truck sat in the north section of the machine shed.
