Part 1: The Stakes in My Meadow
Three weeks after my husband’s funeral, his older brother showed up at our Montana cabin with a surveyor, a thousand-dollar check, and documents he expected me to sign. He told me I had thirty days to leave the seventy acres Luke and I had shared as our home.
The folder Dale Tolliver set on my kitchen table was marked Property Transfer. Behind him, my mother-in-law, Arlene, surveyed the room while I read it. Her gaze lingered on the cabinets Luke had built and the cast-iron skillet he always kept hanging beside the stove.
Outside the window, a white pickup sat idling at the end of the driveway. A man wearing an orange vest was inside, with a tripod case beside him.
[“You brought a surveyor?” I asked.]
“We’re trying to make this easy,” Dale said. He tapped the folder. “There’s a relocation check in there. Ten thousand dollars.”
Luke had been gone twenty-three days. I still woke expecting to hear him making coffee. His boots remained beside the back door because I wasn’t ready to put them away, and now his family had brought someone to measure our land.
[“What are you asking me to sign?”]
