LITMIR.BIZ

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corners of allegiance. The lawyer looked on with horror, shaking his head and muttering in low breaths as someone passed him a drink.

      Then, when there was no more carnage to be wreaked and then cleared, people began to go home. Some stayed to help, but mostly the flat plain of the farm became a barrage of taillights disappearing behind the bend.

      That was when Lou stopped talking. He sat on the bed, lost in thought, and then stood up.

      “Would you like anything?” he asked his wife. She seemed flushed. He knelt over her and felt her forehead but there was no fever.

      “Some water, I think,” he said as if to himself before turning to leave.

      “What was it?” she said quietly to his back. “What made Leo act like that?”

      “What else? The farm,” he said. “As far as I can make out, it’s all gone to Cal—or most of it anyway.” He stopped at the doorway and looked at her. In the dark, the features of her face became a hole filled in by shadow.

      “Do you want some ice?” he asked.

      The instructions of Walter’s will were fairly simple. After a few small bequests to friends and distant relatives, the bulk of the estate would be divided up as such: Piper was to receive a ten percent share of the farm as well as a thousand dollars outright. Leo was to have a twenty percent share as well as another two thousand dollars outright and Cal was to have a full seventy, the main house and all its contents as well as the bulk of Walter’s savings. Walter had a reputation as a frugal man bordering on miserly, and though no one knew how much his savings were specifically, everyone could guess at them being more than substantial.

      My grandfather would tell my father that Walter had dictated a letter a couple of days before he’d died, explaining why he had done what he’d done, to be read by the will’s executor. Everyone would say later that it must have meant he had changed the will at the absolute last minute and so it wasn’t really valid because he wasn’t in his right mind, he was so sick.

      People longed to ask what had been said in the letter, but the truth was no one really knew. None of the people present had been able to hear all of it, because midway through the opening paragraph, Leo had turned around and driven his fist into Cal’s stomach. Piper would later say that she had no idea why she and Cal were present. From what they could gauge the letter was mostly addressed to Leo. It never mentioned Cal or her once.

      That was what happened. But, of course, that wasn’t what people would say.

      She waited. She made her husband breakfast in the morning, she did her chores, she made her lists and she served them both dinner in the evening. The sun rose and fell on her patience and she bided her time listening and hoping that what she had done had been enough.

      Here is a question I am forced to ask: did she really love my grandfather back then? Certainly, she did later, even to the rest of us it was evident. But at the time all those years ago, did she? Or was it simply an escape, just as Lou had been when she was a girl of nineteen—the next rung on the ladder? Or was it that my grandfather had seen in her all the things she had been waiting for someone to find, and in him she saw the potential to realize those dreams into a reality? Is that what you would call love?

      Why, you may wonder, do I not ask the same thing of my grandfather?

      Because there is a much simpler way of clearing that up.

      Two weeks passed and in that time this was what Anne-Marie learned.

      She learned that Leo had not been back to the farm since the day of the funeral.

      She learned that Cal had not refused his share and that he had continued to stay in the main house with his sister and daughter. When the suppliers had rung up, it had been he who fielded their calls, and when the farmhands came down in the evenings, they said it was he who gave them their instructions during the day. Leo stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of town and Cal began to farm Aurelia.

      Piper tried to see Leo. She was admitted into his room at the hotel. She started to tell him Cal’s side of the story. She pleaded with him to see sense and come home. They could still farm the place together, each taking a share, she insisted. It would be a family business just like their father had wanted.

      But when she next tried to call on him a week later, the man at the front desk told her he would not receive her and when she telephoned, she was told that Leo had asked not to be disturbed. She resorted to writing a letter, which she took to the post office and gave to Florence Baxter, who noted the name and address with an uncomfortable grimace. No one saw Cal outside of the farm.

      And then one evening Anne-Marie and her husband sat down to dinner. The meat was overcooked and the vegetables wilted on their forks but they ate it nonetheless. When the doorbell rang, Lou pushed his plate forward and wiped his mouth on the napkin before going to see who it was.

      She heard him before she saw him.

      When he came into the room she saw immediately that he was different. Instead of the cheap salesman suits he usually wore, he was in slacks and a blue plaid shirt. His hair was lightened by the sun and she could see the faint discoloring line on his forearms that spending time out working in the fields had given him.

      “So what can we do for you, Cal, that’s so urgent I can’t finish my supper?” asked Lou as he sat back down at the table to do precisely that.

      Cal didn’t look at Anne-Marie as he spoke.

      “I’ve come to talk to you, sir, about a matter that has been plaguing my conscience for some time now.”

      “Why would you come to me about it? I’m a doctor, not a priest,” Lou joked.

      Anne-Marie saw the ignorance of her husband draw a blank across his features as he stirred his food with his fork and she allowed herself a brief moment of irritation.

      “There’s no real easy way of saying this so I guess I should just say it,” said Cal. Lou did not look up from his plate.

      “I believe I’m in love with your wife, sir,” Cal finished.

      Anne-Marie watched as her husband’s fork paused underneath a heap of sweet corn. His jaw worked slowly as his mouth caught up with his ears.

      “Did you hear me, sir?”

      “Yes, I heard you.” Lou put down his fork and, composing his hands in his lap, stared at Cal.

      “What do you expect me to do about it?”

      Cal flicked a gaze at Anne-Marie but she gave away nothing. This had to be his fight, she decided, though she would never forgive him if he lost.

      “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

      “Well, Cal, you come into my house, interrupt my dinner and tell me that you’re in love with my wife. I assume you’ve done all this for a reason.”

      “Yes, sir. I have. I’ve come to take her home with me, if you’ve no objection.”

      Lou stared at him, incredulous. Suddenly he laughed.

      “Cal, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t hit you. The way you talk I don’t think I could live with myself as a doctor if I hit a simpleton.”

      “I’ve been sleeping with her,” said Cal, “in the full sense of the word. It’s been going on for some time now. I have known her and been with her knowing that she was your wife. But that’s only in name, and now it’s time for her to come home with me, sir. Seeing as how she hasn’t been yours for a long time now, I cannot see how you can object to her returning to her rightful place.”

      For the first and last time in her life Anne-Marie would see a raft of emotions find life in the eyes of Lou Parks. The man who had been little more than a ghost since she’d come to live with him as his wife remembered his blood and let it course in shades of puce and purple throughout his skin. He was so still she wondered if when he finally broke his pause it would be to fly at Cal and try to kill him. She could see Cal bracing himself

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