“You can’t keep it. Not with that payment. He’s right about that.”
“What would you do?”
“I’d do just exactly what he said I’d do. I’d keep it. And it’d bury me.”
Phil took the pencil out of his shirt pocket. He turned Dad’s envelope over to the blank side.
“Butch Sedlacek told me Thursday he asked Dad twice for the east eighty.”
“He’s wanted it since I was in high school.”
“What’s dryland ground worth out here?”
“Laying right against a man who wants it? Five thousand an acre.”
He wrote it down. Eighty times five thousand.
Four hundred thousand dollars.
Under it, he wrote three hundred eighty-eight. And he drew a line.
We both sat there and looked at what was under that line.
“That clears the bank,” Phil said slowly. “All of it. With the eighty. Just the eighty.”
