“Eugene, promise me you won’t let him make you small after I’m gone.”
I gave her the promise because that’s what you do for a dying woman.
The meaning didn’t reach me.
Not yet.
Here’s what I had no way of knowing.
During the final six months of her life, Irene had been working steadily with an attorney named Claudette Norvell, a sharp, no-nonsense woman out of Richmond.
Irene had found her through someone in her church choir.
Without saying a word to me, Irene had reorganized everything we owned between us.
The house.
Her father’s farmland out past Luray, which had gone untouched for decades.
Even the small life insurance policy.
Everything had been folded into a revocable trust, with precise conditions woven through it.
She kept the specifics to herself.
All she said was, “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do, and Claudette will help you do it.”
I figured she meant after my own death, tying up loose ends for whoever was left.
I was badly mistaken.
She was describing something that would unfold while I was still standing.
In the two years following Irene’s death, Curtis and Petra began reaching out more regularly.
Sunday dinners.
An invitation to a cabin near Chincoteague Bay.
I convinced myself the distance between us was finally closing.
That losing Irene had changed my son and brought him back around.
Now I see it differently.
I believe Petra had been running figures on that land out past Luray.
Word had been circulating in the county about a solar company moving through the area, acquiring parcels, and Irene’s land sat squarely in that corridor.
None of that had reached me at the time.
What I felt was simply that my son was calling.
And I soaked it up the way a man soaks up any warmth after he’s put his wife in the ground.
That July, Curtis proposed a family trip.
A rental out on Chincoteague Island in Chincoteague Bay.
“Get out of the house,” he said. “Real time together.”
Petra’s sister, Ruth Ann, joined us, along with her husband, Dougal.
He was a man who kept largely to himself, which I’d eventually understand was not the same thing as having good character.
The drive took me about two hours from Ashland.
When I rolled into the gravel driveway and first took in the rental, a wide, cedar-shingled place with a screened porch and a floating dock out back, there was already something unsettled in my stomach.
A tightness I chalked up to too much coffee and a long stretch behind the wheel.
I should have listened to what my body was trying to tell me.
That’s a lesson I earned the painful way.
The first night, we gathered on the back deck, eating pork ribs Curtis had grilled while Petra talked through some new listings she’d landed.
Waterfront property valued at more than every sale I’d rung up across my entire career.
I mentioned, almost as an aside, that my stomach had been bothering me.
Probably just the drive.
“Dad,” Curtis said, his eyes still on his plate, “or gas station coffee.”
Petra offered something, and Ruth Ann found it worth a full laugh.