I tore that envelope open in Mr. Pruitts leather chair, and Walts blocky print filled three pages, and by the second one I understood why he told the lawyer to let me be angry.
My Dolores, he wrote, though my name is not Dolores, my name is Marlene, and that was the first joke, because Walt always said if he ever wrote me a serious letter he would get my name wrong on purpose so I would laugh before I cried. I laughed. Then I cried.
He wrote that he had known for forty years that I never loved the farm the way he did. That I stayed on it because he was on it. That every morning I walked out to that cornfield for him, not for the corn, and he had seen it and never said, because he was selfish and wanted me there.
My husband spent his whole life letting me believe the farm was our shared dream, when the truth he hid was that he always knew it was only ever his, and he had quietly spent forty years making sure I could walk away from it the day he was gone.
There was a second account at the bank in town, in my name, that he had been feeding a little every harvest since 1984. Not a fortune. Enough. Enough that I do not have to sell the farm to eat, which means for the first time in fifty years selling it is a choice and not a sentence.
Sell it, he wrote. Or keep it and rent the ground to the Hollis boys who have been wanting it. Move to town near the girls. Go to the ocean you have never seen. You gave me fifty years on my dream, Marlene. The account is me giving you back whatever years you have left, to spend on yours.
He signed it, your Walt, who married the prettiest girl at the Grange hall and never deserved her.
I did not sell the farm. I rented the ground to the Hollis boys, and I took the account, and in November I am flying to see the Pacific Ocean with both my daughters, because a man I was married to for fifty years spent forty of them making sure I could. I was angry at him for about four minutes. Then I let him be right, the way he always was.