—
The attorney stopped reading.
I waited for him to continue.
He didn’t.
My name is Wade Kucera. I was fifty-one when my father died, and for twenty-two years, I’d worked alongside him on our family’s Nebraska farm.
I’d planted corn in the spring, repaired machinery in winter, moved cattle through blizzards, and spent more mornings behind a tractor wheel than I could count.
My older brother, Phil, had chosen a different life.
He was fifty-six and sold insurance in Omaha.
He hadn’t farmed seriously since he was a young man.
But on that cold Tuesday in late February, inside a lawyer’s office above a hardware store in St. Paul, Nebraska, Phil inherited virtually everything.
Attorney Don Jensen had just read the portion of Dad’s will concerning my brother.
“To my son Phil, the home farm, including the home quarter, east eighty, creek pasture, buildings, irrigation equipment, and machinery.”
Four hundred acres.
The house where we’d grown up.
The shop where I’d repaired tractors for decades.
The center-pivot irrigation system.
And the pastures where I’d raised my cattle.
Then Don read my inheritance.
“To my son Wade, the 1994 International feed truck, including the mixer box and title.”
That was all.
One old truck.
I stared at the table.
Surely there was another paragraph.
Perhaps Dad had left me a portion of the land separately.
Maybe I’d misunderstood.
But Don folded the document.
He looked uncomfortable.
“Wade, I want you to understand something. Your father came here in November. He was mentally sound, and he knew what he was signing.”
I nodded.
“I believe you.”
“I asked him whether he wanted to explain why he’d divided things this way.”
“What did he say?”
Don hesitated.
“He said, ‘Write it exactly the way I told you.’”
I almost smiled.
That sounded like Dad.
Albert Kucera wasn’t a man who enjoyed explaining himself.
Once he’d made a decision, he expected everyone else to accept it.
