These days, when I drive out to the cabin at Tull Lake on a Sunday afternoon, I let myself take the long way around, past the feed store and the little Baptist church with the crooked steeple, just so I can watch the light come down through the cottonwoods before I turn onto the gravel. I own that road frontage. I have owned it for twenty-four years. My family did not know that until the winter they told me to stop depending on them, and I finally let them find out exactly who had been depending on whom.
I am fifty-four years old. I have lived in Amber Grove, Missouri my whole life, the kind of town where the feed store still cashes checks for people the bank won’t, where the VFW hall smells like Folgers and floor wax every Friday night, and where everybody’s business gets discussed over the meat counter whether they want it discussed or not. My name is Yolande Fairholm. My father was Ellis Fairholm, born and raised on Fairholm land three miles outside town, and my mother came up from a family of cotton pickers and cannery workers near the Texas border, so I have always carried two different kinds of stubbornness in me, and both of them came in useful the year my family decided I was the weak link.
I want to tell you what happened at that holiday lunch. But first I need to tell you how I became the kind of daughter a family can lean on for thirty years without ever once looking down to see what she was standing on.
The Girl Who Was Good At This Stuff
I was the oldest of three. My brother Winnow came two years after me, and my brother Delacour came four years after him, and by the time I was twelve, I already understood something the two of them never had to learn: in our house, being capable was not a gift, it was a job assignment, and once you got the assignment, nobody ever came back to check if you wanted it.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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