Frank Myers had handled the Dalton family’s legal work since 1992. His office was on Second Street above the pharmacy and his desk was always covered in papers arranged in a system only he understood. Raymond sat across from him the next morning and said, “I want to know which of my children would come to see me if I had nothing left to give them.”
Frank set down his pen. “What exactly are you asking me to do?” Raymond laid it out. Redirect all farm income through a trust account Frank would control. Move the equipment into Harold Jensen’s barns. Move out of the farmhouse and into the old single-wide trailer on the north forty, the one they had used for seasonal workers in the nineties. Call the children and tell them the farm had gone under. Bad crop years, poor investments, debts he had been hiding.
“This is a bad idea, Ray.” “Probably. If they find out you lied, they’ll be furious. If none of them come to see me when I’m broke, their fury won’t matter.” Frank studied him for a long time. Then he opened a legal pad and started writing.
Harold Jensen came over on the last Wednesday in August and found Raymond loading boxes into his truck. Harold was sixty-eight, a cattle rancher who had worked the land next to Raymond’s since before either of them had gray hair. Their wives had been best friends. Harold had carried Eileen’s casket.
“What are you doing, Ray?” Raymond told him. Harold leaned against the fence post, arms crossed, listening with the patience of a man who had heard plenty of bad ideas in his life and recognized another one. “Eileen would have words about this,” Harold said. “Eileen had words about everything. She’d say you were being dramatic. She’d probably be right.”
Raymond set a box in the truck bed. “But she also wrote that my children only talk to me in transactions. I need to know if she was right about that, too.” Harold looked at the Cadillac in the driveway, silver with leather seats Eileen had loved. “What about the car?” “It’s yours for a dollar.” “I don’t want your car, Ray.” “Then park it in your barn. When this is over, I’ll decide what to do with it.” Harold took the keys and shook his head the way a man does when he knows arguing is pointless.
Raymond moved into the trailer on September first. It was twelve feet wide and fifty-six feet long with wood-paneled walls and a linoleum floor that curled at the edges. The plumbing worked. The furnace ran when it felt like it. He brought Eileen’s photograph, her recipe box, her journal, and enough clothes for the season. He left the farmhouse locked and dark.
That evening he sat on the trailer’s fold-down step and made four phone calls. Marcus picked up on the third ring, half listening, the sound of an office behind him. Raymond told the story he had rehearsed with Frank. Bad investments, collapsed grain prices, leveraged debt. Everything gone. Living in the trailer on the north forty.