My knees were still stiff from the ride back in Ellen’s Buick when Travis tried to smile his way out of a felony.

The bell over the front door at Hollis Feed and Seed made that exact same metallic jangle it had made since 1974. I used to grease the spring myself with lard when it started squeaking during the damp spring months, back when Paul was still alive and we had thirty head of feeder calves out in the north pasture.

Travis didn’t know grease from axle dust. He had on a pair of shiny leather loafers that looked like they’d never seen a speck of manure or a stray hull of oats.

He was standing right behind the wooden counter where we keep the blue tally pads and the jars of peppermint candy. Next to him was Colton Briggs, a man whose family bought three thousand acres of bottomland over near Stroud last fall and thought that gave them the right to buy up every small outfit in the county. Between them stood a woman in a gray blazer with a leather portfolio tucked under her arm like a shield.

“Aunt Jean,” Travis said, and he put his hands up on the wood palms-down, the way he must have practiced in front of some mirror in Tulsa. “We were just about to call you. You missed us at the house.”

I didn’t take off my coat. The wool was heavy, and it smelled faintly of the stale peppermint Ellen had unwrapped for me outside the Dollar General forty minutes before.

“Tell me what, Travis,” I said.

My voice didn’t shake. That surprised me, because my hands had been doing a fine little dance of their own ever since Ellen handed me the phone in the parking lot behind the pharmacy. My fingers felt like dry twigs.

Colton shifted his weight from one shiny boot to the other. “Look, Mrs. Hollis. It’s a clean transition. Travis explained that you were ready to step back. We’ve got the capital to upgrade the grain bins and bring in the new fertilizer lines by Monday.”

“Travis explained what?” I asked.

Travis cleared his throat. He had Paul’s narrow chin, which always looked like it was trying to apologize for being attached to the rest of a face. “I told him you’ve been having the dizzy spells, Aunt Jean.

The cardiologist in Springfield. It’s too much for you. Thirty-eight percent of a working store is a lot of paperwork. I told him we could handle the buyout right here while you were out of town so you wouldn’t have to worry about the numbers.”

The woman in the gray blazer opened her leather folder about an inch. She didn’t look at me. She looked at a corner of the ceiling where a dead horsefly had been stuck in the cobwebs since August. “The purchase agreement has been executed under the family exemption clause for minor partners,” she said. Her voice sounded like she had practiced it in a law office basement in Muskogee. “Mr. Travis Hollis holds power of attorney for estate management purposes regarding the physical property, and, “

“He holds nothing of the sort,” I said.

The silence in the store got very thick, very fast. You could hear the old floor-model soda cooler humming in the corner, rattling its copper pipes the way it had every July since the Carter administration.

Travis gave that little half-laugh he does when he’s caught taking two candy bars out of the box instead of one. “Aunt Jean. Please. It’s mercy. You don’t need the stress.”

There it was again. That word. Mercy.

He had texted it to me at 3:14 while Ellen was paying for three rolls of paper towels and a box of dry oats. Aunt Jean, this is mercy. You don’t need the stress. My thumb had slipped when I tried to call him back, and the screen went black twice before Ellen took the phone out of my hand and said, “Mama, sit down in the car right now.”

I didn’t sit down in the car. I walked right past Colton Briggs and his shiny boots, right past the woman in the gray blazer who smelled like expensive lavender soap and didn’t know what a ninety-pound sack of cracked corn felt like against your spine, and I walked straight back to my office behind the seed bins.

The office is four paces wide and six paces long. Paul built the partition out of oak boards he salvaged from an old tobacco barn down near the river when we were first starting out. The bottom three inches of the door are chewed up where our old blue-tick hound, Buster, used to scratch to get in out of the winter wind.

Travis had already been in there.

I could tell because the heavy green plastic plant, the one made of silk that I bought at the TG&Y thirty years ago because real ferns won’t live in the dust, had been shoved three inches to the left. Behind it was the safe. It’s an old Mosler with a round brass dial that you have to turn left twice to forty-four, right once to twelve, left to thirty. My father bought it second-hand off a hardware store that went under in Okmulgee during the Eisenhower years.

Travis didn’t know the combination. He thought he did. He thought because he helped me haul it off the back of the pickup truck when Paul died that he’d memorized the clicks.

You could see where he’d tried to pry the small metal door with a flathead screwdriver. There was a fresh silver scratch right across the brass plate, right below the serial number. He’d probably spent twenty minutes in here sweating through his little Tulsa shirt, trying to wedge a tool into a three-thousand-pound cast-iron box while the UPS man was out front dropping off three boxes of cattle salt.

I didn’t use the screwdriver. I just knelt down on the linoleum, it’s old gray sheet vinyl that’s curled up at the seams near the radiator, and I put my ear right against the cold metal the way my daddy taught me. You don’t listen for the numbers. You listen for the little click in the tumblers when they drop into the groove. It sounds like a beetle hitting a screen door.

Click. Click. Click.

The heavy door swung out with that long, slow sigh it always makes when the air pressure hits it.

Inside was a cedar box with a brass latch. Inside that was the blue folder.

By the time I walked back out into the main aisle, Travis had moved around the counter. He had his hand out toward me, not to help me up, but to block the way. His face had gone that dull, pasty gray that people get when they realize they’ve jumped off the hayloft before checking if the wagon is underneath.

“Aunt Jean,” he said, and his voice went up an octave. “Don’t do this. We can talk about the percentage. Colton’s paying a good price. Three hundred thousand total. Your share is, “

“My share isn’t for sale, Travis,” I said.

I dropped the blue folder right on top of the pile of fly spray boxes. The cardboard made a dry *thwack*.

“What is that?” Colton asked. He wasn’t looking at Travis anymore. He was looking at the way my hands weren’t shaking at all now. When you’ve spent forty years hauling feed sacks and pitching manure in forty-degree weather, your hands know what’s heavy and what isn’t. That folder weighed about four ounces, but it felt like an anchor.

“That,” I told him, “is page six of the partnership agreement Paul and I drew up with the bank in nineteen-ninety-nine when Cousin Dean tried to sell the grain scales during his second divorce.”

The woman in the gray blazer finally looked down at the folder. Her eyebrows went up about half an inch. “That would be a superseded document if the primary owner, “

“Read paragraph four, honey,” I said. I didn’t yell. You don’t have to yell when you’ve got the signature page right under your thumb. “The one where it says no family member can transfer, assign, or sell any portion of their holdings without ninety days’ notice by certified mail and the written, notarized consent of every remaining partner of record.”

Travis reached out then. He actually lunged for the folder.

He’s twenty-four years old and runs three miles every morning before sunrise because he read it in some magazine on his phone. He should have been faster than a seventy-two-year-old woman with a bad knee and a cardiologist in Springfield.

He didn’t get it because Ellen came around the corner from the register with her car keys still between her knuckles like brass knuckles. She didn’t hit him. She just laid her flat palm right over the top of the blue folder so hard the metal brads punched through the cardboard.

“Don’t touch her things, Travis,” Ellen said. She sounded like she was talking to a stray dog that had wandered onto the porch with a porcupine quill in its nose. “You’ve done enough for one afternoon.”

“I have power of attorney,” Travis stammered. He was sweating right through the collar of his blue shirt now. A little dark circle had formed under each arm, right where the cotton was stretched tight across his chest. “Mom said I could handle the paperwork while she was, while she was getting her heart checked. Aunt Jean, you were in Springfield! You weren’t even here!”

“I was forty-seven miles away,” I agreed. “And you figured I’d come back too tired to read the fine print.”

I didn’t wait for him to think of another lie about mercy or modernization or my blood pressure. I reached down, picked up the landline phone from the counter, the black rotary one we kept because the cordless dies whenever the wind blows over the transformer on County Road 4, and I punched three buttons with my thumb.

Ray Donnelly answered on the second ring. Ray doesn’t use voicemail. If you call Ray, you talk to Ray, or you talk to his hound dog howling in the bed of his Ford while he’s unloading sixty-pound mineral blocks in the rain.

“Ray,” I said.

“Jean?” His voice came through the little black holes in the plastic receiver like he was standing right behind the salt licks. “You folks open? I need four tons of the range cubes before the front comes in tonight. Travis told me on the phone twenty minutes ago you were shutting the grain side down for good and he was taking over the accounts.”

Travis made a little choking sound in the back of his throat. He looked like he wanted to crawl under the pallet of horse liniment.

“Travis didn’t tell you the whole story, Ray,” I said, and I looked right at Colton Briggs while I said it, watching the color drain out of the man’s face until he looked like an old sack of lime left out in the dew. “Why don’t you ask Travis what he sold Colton before I read you page six of the book?”

Nobody moved for three whole seconds.

Outside, a red-wing blackbird landed on the tin roof of the grain shed and started making that dry, clicking racket they make right before a storm blows down off the hills. The old soda cooler gave a sharp *clonk* as its compressor kicked off, and then there wasn’t any sound left in the room except the way Travis was breathing, short and shallow, like a calf with the shipping fever.

Colton reached out and picked up his leather briefcase from the counter. He didn’t look at the woman in the gray blazer. He didn’t look at Travis. He just looked at the floor where my old rubber boots had left a small, dry ring of red clay from the drive.

“We’ll talk about this at the office,” Colton muttered to nobody in particular. He didn’t say goodbye. He just backed out through the jangling door so fast he caught his shoulder on the screen frame, and the latch banged twice against the cedar siding before it settled.

The woman in the gray blazer closed her portfolio. She did it very slowly, smoothing the leather flap down with the palm of her hand like she was tucking a child into bed.

“My firm,” she said to the dead horsefly on the ceiling, “was under the impression that the documentation was complete.”

“Your firm didn’t check the safe,” I told her.

She didn’t answer. She just picked up her canvas bag, gave Travis one long, flat look that told him he wouldn’t be getting a reference for his little Tulsa real estate course, and walked out the door without letting it jangle more than once.

When the latch clicked shut behind her, the store felt bigger than it had all morning. The smell of molasses and sweet feed and old iron came back up through the floorboards where it belonged, thick and heavy and smelling like sixty years of people who stayed where they were put.

Travis didn’t leave. He just stood there with his hands flat against the wood, staring down at the blue folder like it was going to bite him.

“Aunt Jean,” he whispered. His voice sounded thin now, like paper that had been left out in the sun too long. “I was just trying to make it easier. The taxes are going up. The bank, “

“The bank doesn’t want you, Travis,” I said. I picked up the folder and slid it back into the cedar box, then turned the brass latch until it clicked. “And neither does Ray.”

The phone was still warm against my ear. Ray Donnelly was still breathing on the other end of the line, waiting to hear about his four tons of range cubes.

“You still there, Ray?” I asked.

“I’m here, Jean,” Ray said. “What’s that boy been up to?”

“Nothing,” I told him, and I reached over to pick up the tally pad so I could write down his order before the sun went down behind the ridge. “Nothing at all.”