Nora came every weekend. She drove three hours each way with Lily and Sam buckled in the backseat, and she sat beside Eileen’s bed and read aloud from the novels with weathered spines that lived on the shelf above the fireplace. Eileen died on a Thursday in July. The corn was chest-high in the fields outside the bedroom window. Raymond was holding her hand when she stopped breathing, and he kept holding it for a long time after.
The funeral was on a Saturday. Two hundred people filled the Lutheran church on Main Street, farmers in pressed shirts and their wives in dark dresses, and the women from Eileen’s quilting circle sitting together in the third row. The minister spoke about kindness and faith and the kind of woman who made everyone around her feel seen. Raymond sat in the front pew with his four children and heard very little of it.
Afterward, in the church parking lot, Raymond saw Marcus standing beside a silver sedan that didn’t belong to anyone in the family. The man he was talking to wore a suit too sharp for a funeral in rural Iowa. Raymond recognized him from the county business directory, commercial real estate development. He heard Marcus say the words grain elevator valuations before he turned away and went back inside.
Diane sat in the fellowship hall during the reception, her phone face down on the table beside a plate of food she hadn’t touched. Every few minutes, her hand drifted to the phone and flipped it over. She checked the screen, set it back down, and looked up with an expression meant to suggest she had been present the entire time.
Kevin found Raymond near the coat rack in the hallway. He shuffled his feet and looked at the floor and asked quietly whether the life insurance had been filed yet. Raymond told him he hadn’t gotten to it. Kevin nodded and said he understood, and then asked if Raymond had a rough timeline.
Nora found Raymond in the kitchen. He was standing alone by the sink, not doing anything, just standing there with his hands flat on the counter and the water running. She walked up beside him and turned off the faucet. Then she took his hand. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. She stood with him while the noise of the reception carried through the walls, and she held on until he was ready to go back out.
That was the funeral. That was what Raymond saw. The months that followed confirmed what the funeral had suggested. Marcus called in September, not to ask how Raymond was eating or sleeping or managing the silence. Marcus called to suggest they liquidate the grain elevators. “The market’s peaking, Dad. If you sell now, you’d get top dollar. Let me put together a proposal.”
Raymond said he would think about it. Marcus called back two weeks later with spreadsheets attached to an email Raymond never opened. Diane missed Thanksgiving. She sent a text message the morning of, something about a conference in Dallas that couldn’t be rescheduled. Raymond read the message, set the phone on the counter, and cooked a turkey breast he ate alone at the kitchen table. Eileen’s chair sat empty across from him, pushed in neatly, the cushions still holding the impression of her weight.