And we did. Side by side. For nineteen years.

He paid me a wage. Not a big one. Fourteen dollars an hour at first, eventually twenty. He paid my health insurance. He let me live in the little house on the east eighty, the one my grandparents retired to.

We never wrote anything down. There was never any paper about the land. Dad didn’t believe in paper between family.

“It’ll all be yours someday,” he’d say, whenever the subject came up. Which wasn’t often. “Don’t worry about that.”

So I didn’t.

Part Two: Elaine

Dad married Elaine when I was twenty-four.

She was a widow from Sheldon, twenty miles east. Her first husband had been a pharmacist who died of a heart attack at fifty-one. She had two sons, Brad and Kyle, who were in their late teens when Dad married her. They both moved to Phoenix after high school and never came back.

Elaine was fifty when she married Dad. Small, neat, with short silver hair and reading glasses she wore on a beaded chain. She’d taught home economics at Sheldon High School for twenty-six years.

She was not a farm woman. She’d never lived on a farm in her life.

I want to be fair to her. I’ve thought about this a lot.

She tried. She learned to drive the grain truck the first fall, though she ground the gears so badly that Ron, our grain hauler, started calling it “Elaine’s coffee grinder.” She learned to make harvest meals for a crew of six and have them in the field by noon. She planted a vegetable garden and canned tomatoes and kept the farmhouse spotless.

And she made Dad happy. I’d never seen him happy since my mother died. With Elaine, he laughed more. He went to church potlucks. He took her to the Okoboji lakes for their anniversary every June.

For that alone, I was grateful to her.

But she and I never got close.

I don’t know whose fault that was. Probably both of ours. I was a grown man when she arrived, set in my ways, used to it being just Dad and me. She was a grown woman who’d already raised her own boys and didn’t need another one.

We were polite. We were respectful. She’d set a plate for me at supper, and I’d thank her for it. I’d fix her leaky faucets and shovel her walk.

But I always had the feeling I was a guest at her table. And I suspect she always had the feeling she was a guest on my farm.

Part Three: Two Years Ago

Dad died two years ago this past August.

He was sixty-eight. He’d been feeling tired for a few weeks, short of breath, but he wouldn’t go to the doctor in the middle of the summer. Too much to do.

One afternoon, he was spraying the north quarter. He didn’t come in for supper.

I found the sprayer stopped at the end of a row, engine still idling. He was slumped over the steering wheel.

Heart attack. The doctor said it was massive. That he probably didn’t feel much.

I hope that’s true.

Brad and Kyle flew in from Phoenix for the funeral. They stayed two nights at the Super 8 in Primghar. They wore sunglasses in the church. They checked their phones during the graveside service.

At the luncheon in the church basement, Brad asked me what the land was worth per acre.

I told him I didn’t know. That wasn’t true. I knew exactly. But it didn’t seem like the right question to answer over ham sandwiches.

They flew back to Phoenix the next morning. They haven’t been back since.

Dad’s will was simple. One page. He’d done it at the lawyer’s office in Primghar right after he married Elaine, fourteen years earlier.

Everything to his wife.

That was it. No mention of me. No mention of the land. No mention of nineteen years.

The lawyer, an old man named Harold Bauer, read it to us in his office. When he finished, he took off his glasses and looked at me.

“Mark,” he said. “I asked your dad about this. When he signed it. I asked if he wanted to make provisions for you.”

“What did he say?”

Harold sighed.

“He said Elaine would do right by you,” he said. “He said she’d know what he wanted.”