My wife, Theresa, sat beside me.
Her hand rested firmly on my knee beneath the table.
I knew she was angry.
But she didn’t interrupt.
I stood, thanked Don, and shook his hand.
Then I walked downstairs.
Outside, a bitter north wind swept across the street.
Theresa followed me to our pickup.
“Wade, you need another attorney.”
“No.”
“Someone independent. Someone who can review that will.”
“No, Theresa.”
She stared at me.
“You spent twenty-two years working that land.”
“I know how long I was there.”
“Then how can you just accept this?”
I looked toward the gray Nebraska sky.
“Because that’s Dad’s signature.”
“So?”
“He’s been dead three weeks. He can’t sit across a table and tell me what he meant. I’m not going to spend the next few years fighting a man who can’t answer me.”
Theresa looked at me for a long time.
Then she silently pulled my coat collar higher against the wind.
That was her way of telling me she disagreed but still loved me.
A moment later, Phil appeared outside.
He approached slowly, holding his reading glasses.
“Wade?”
I turned.
“I didn’t ask Dad for the farm,” he said.
“I know.”
“I had no idea he’d done this until Don called.”
“I believe you.”
Phil looked toward the pavement.
“I can’t understand why he’d leave everything this way.”
“Neither can I.”
He seemed about to say something else.
But he stopped.
Then he walked toward his car.
For months afterward, I remembered that moment.
Two brothers standing outside a lawyer’s office, both confused, both hurt, and neither willing to say what he was really thinking.
**If either of us had spoken one more honest sentence that afternoon, we might have avoided four months of misery.**
