I was setting up chairs for a paying client’s rehearsal dinner when I heard the cars. Three vehicles pulling into the gravel driveway, the sound carrying through the open barn doors in the specific way that sounds carry on still April afternoons when the Hill Country has gone quiet between wind gusts. I set down the chair I was holding and walked to the barn entrance, wiping my hands on my jeans, and there was my brother Craig stepping out of his Lexus in a Hawaiian shirt with his arms spread wide like he was arriving at a resort he had personally arranged.
“The place looks amazing,” he called across the yard.
“You’ve really fixed it up.”
Behind him, two SUVs were disgorging their contents. Six children ranging in age from toddler to teenager hit the ground and scattered immediately in the direction of the pool.
A woman I didn’t recognize came around the rear of the second vehicle carrying a Pack ‘n Play. Stephanie, Craig’s wife, was already on her phone, shielding her eyes and surveying the property with the appraising expression of someone calculating what things are worth.
Twelve people total.
I counted them the way you count anything when you are trying to understand the scale of what you are facing. This was the same brother who had called the property “that dump” when our grandmother was alive. Who had not visited her once in the final eleven years of her life.
Who had called twice during her illness, once to ask about the will and once to say he couldn’t make Thanksgiving.
Who had sent a gift card to a restaurant in Austin for Christmas, a restaurant she had never been to and could not have reached by December when she could no longer leave the bed. Who had stood in the parking lot of a lawyer’s office in Fredericksburg and asked me how I could have known about the will, his face red and accusing, while I stood there in jeans that still smelled like my grandmother’s lavender soap because I hadn’t left the farm yet and hadn’t been able to make myself leave.
He was standing in my driveway telling me to cancel my paying clients, and his kids were already at my pool. I need to go back further to explain why any of this matters, and why the explanation requires going back at all.
The summer I turned nine, my grandmother taught me to patch a fence using baling wire and a pair of pliers that had belonged to her own grandfather.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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