Gary came at Christmas. He called on Sundays. He lives in Knoxville, has a good job, has a family of his own. I’m not saying Gary is a bad person. He’s my brother and I love him.

But he was not there. He sent money a few times when things were tight, and I think that’s part of why he feels okay about all of this. Like it balanced out somehow. It didn’t balance out.

Land follows the name. That’s what Daddy used to say. His granddaddy said it, his daddy said it, he said it. The farm goes to the son. Gary is the son. That’s four generations of that being the way it works, and Daddy believed in it right down to his last breath. I don’t think he was a cruel man. I think he genuinely did not see what he was doing. Or maybe he saw it and thought that was just how things had to be. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out for six weeks and I still don’t have an answer.

What I do know is that Darlene gave ten years of her life to that man, and he gave her five thousand dollars. That’s five hundred dollars a year. That’s less than a dollar and a half a day. When I let myself actually do that math, I have to stop and just sit with it for a minute because it doesn’t feel real.

“The will is legal, Darlene,” I told her Thursday night. I said it quietly because I didn’t want it to sound like I was taking a side.

She looked up from the mug. “I know it’s legal. I’m asking if you’ll help me contest it.”

I asked her what grounds. She said undue influence, maybe. Or lack of testamentary capacity toward the end. She’d already talked to a lawyer, apparently. I didn’t know that. She said the lawyer told her the case was hard but not impossible. And then she said the window to file closes Friday at five.

Today is Friday.

I called Gary Wednesday, before she came over, because I already knew this was coming. I’d seen it building for weeks. He was calm on the phone, the way Gary gets when he’s decided something and doesn’t want to be talked out of it. He said Daddy’s wishes were Daddy’s wishes. He said Daddy worked that land his whole life and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. He said Darlene had made her choices and he wasn’t going to feel guilty about where those choices led.

“She chose to stay,” Gary said.