My Brother-in-Law Sold All 212 Hay Bales Three Days After My Husband’s Funeral So I Asked One Question: “Who Bought Them?”

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And Karen. About Dwayne.

I know my brother. I’ve known him fifty years. He’s not a bad man. He’s a scared one. He’s been scared since our dad died and left the place to me, because I was the eldest and the steady one, and Dwayne got the pickup and a hundred dollars. He’s never forgiven it. He’ll hurt you, if there’s a chance. Not because he hates you. Because he thinks, down deep, that he’s owed.

Don’t let him take the place. But don’t let him fall, either. He’s the only brother I’ve got. If you can find it in you, give him a way back.

It’s the hardest thing I’ll ever ask you to do.

I loved you every day.

Tom

I read it twice. Then I folded it in four and held it against my chest, and I cried the way I hadn’t been able to cry since the diagnosis, deep and ugly and unembarrassed, bent over with my forehead nearly touching the sod. The meadowlark stopped. Then it started again.

I did not tell Dwayne right away.

I thought about it for two weeks. I counted the money at the kitchen table, forty-one thousand, three hundred dollars, in mostly twenties and fifties, with a few hundred-dollar bills from the early years. I took it to the bank in Valentine and paid off the note on the north eighty. I put the rest in a savings account in Ben’s name and mine.

Then I went to see my mother-in-law.

Ada Haller was eighty-four and had lived with Dwayne and his wife Marlene in a split-level in Cody since 2019. She’d had a stroke the year before, a small one, and walked with a quad cane. She was in the front room when I came in, watching a game show with the sound off.

“Karen,” she said. “Sit down. You’ve lost weight.”

“I’m all right, Ada.”

“You’re not. But you’re a Haller, so you’ll say you are.” She patted the arm of her chair. “I hear Dwayne caused trouble.”

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