We weren’t perfect, mind you. We fought like brothers dobut we always came back around by supper. That’s just how it was. I figured nothing could ever really break it.

Then Daddy died in the spring of ’89, and we buried him, and two brothers who shared a laugh turned into two strangers over a piece of dirt.

Wayne wanted to keep the farm. I had two kids and a mortgage and a wife working nights, and I needed my half in cash. We sat in a lawyer’s office in town and said the kind of things brothers know exactly how to say, the things that land because you know right where the soft spots are. I told him Daddy always liked him best. He told me I’d sell the family out for a truck payment. We both meant it that day. And then we just stopped. Thirty-seven years. Our sister Linda mailed Christmas pictures both directions so each of us knew the other was stillalive. That was the whole of it. A stamp once a year.