end of February, or they’d lose the date.”
I sat there with my coffee getting cold.
I’d always thought they sold the land and then decided on the wedding. That it was a windfall. A gift.
But that’s not what happened. They’d booked the wedding first. They’d put down a deposit they didn’t have. And then they’d sold Grandpa’s eighty, at a discount, to pay for it.
Four months after he died.
“How much did you pay?” I asked. “Per acre?”
See more on the next page
Vern looked at me for a long time.
“Four thousand, three hundred and seventy-five,” he said.
Then he picked up a pencil from the cup on the table. He took a seed company notepad off the counter. He wrote a number on it and turned it around so I could see.
$4,375.
“That’s my number,” Vern said. “Per acre. What I paid. Not what it’s worth now. What I paid.”
