There wasn’t a next one.

It was a Tuesday, the last week of February, in a little office above the hardware store in St. Paul, Nebraska. The radiator ticked. Somebody downstairs was cutting a key, and you could hear the grinder through the floor.

My brother Phil sat across the table from me in a sport coat, with his reading glasses folded in his hand. He didn’t look up.

The sentence right before mine had been his.

“To my son Phil, the home place, being the home quarter, the east eighty, and the creek pasture, with the buildings, the irrigation equipment, and the machinery.”

Four hundred acres. The center pivot. The house we were both raised in. The shop where I’d spent twenty-two winters with my hands inside one piece of iron or another.

Phil is fifty-six. He sells insurance in Omaha. He hadn’t driven a tractor in thirty years.

I’m fifty-one. I hadn’t gone more than nine days in a row without driving one since I was a boy.

The lawyer’s name was Don Jensen. He was a decent man who’d known my father since they were both kids in 4-H. He set the paper down on the table and squared it with two fingers.

“Wade,” he said. “He came in here in November, and he was in his right mind. I want you to hear that from me. He knew exactly what he was signing.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“He didn’t say why. I asked him.”

“What did he say?”

Don rubbed his jaw.

“He said, ‘Write it the way I told you, Don.’”

That was my father. Word for word. I could hear him saying it.

My wife, Theresa, was sitting next to me. She had her hand on my knee under the table, and she’d been pressing down the whole time. The way you hold a gate shut in a north wind.

I stood up. I shook Don’s hand. I thanked him, because my mother raised us to thank people.

Then I went down the stairs.

That’s the only time a lawyer comes into this story.

Outside it was twenty degrees, with a north wind, and the sky was the color of a galvanized stock tank.

Theresa caught up with me at the pickup. She keeps the books for the vet clinic in town, and she doesn’t say a word about anything until she’s got it added up.

“Call a lawyer of your own, Wade,” she said. “Not Don. Somebody from Grand Island.”

“No.”

“Twenty-two years. You have twenty-two years in that ground.”

“I know how many years.”

“Then why not?”

I had to think about how to say it. Because I hadn’t said it to myself yet.

“Because that’s his signature,” I said. “He’s three weeks in the ground. He can’t tell me what he meant. I’m not going to stand up in a courtroom and argue with a man who can’t answer back. Not him.”

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she reached up and pulled my coat collar up against the wind. That’s what she does when she’s lost an argument and loves me anyway.