My knuckles throbbed in the autumn chill.
“Your father built this place on handshake agreements and steady growth, Gerald.”
He threw another stack of pots down, the plastic cracking under his grip.
“We have to adapt, Martha, or this dirt will be all we have left.”
He climbed back into the cab and slammed the door before I could ask him about the missing county paperwork.
After the sun went down, I sat in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to whistle.
The house felt too quiet without the hum of the heater, which had been rattling since the first frost.
I opened the green leather ledger on the kitchen table to log the daily retail sales.
When I flipped back to late August to check the fertilizer expenses, my eyes caught a pencil entry in Gerald’s cramped handwriting.
He had logged twelve thousand dollars for a business trip to Los Angeles to look at rare palm tree specimens.
I stared at the line, my hand hovering over the warm ceramic of my teacup.
There were no receipts in the envelope for Los Angeles, only a hand-written voucher Gerald had signed himself.
We had never spent more than fifteen hundred dollars on a single sourcing trip in thirty years.
I closed the book and decided to see our attorney first thing in the morning.
Raymond’s office on Main Street smelled of old paper and peppermint drops.
He sat behind his heavy mahogany desk, carefully wiping the nib of his fountain pen with a small square of black felt before laying it down.
“The original partnership deed is quite clear, Martha,” Raymond said, his voice measured and formal.
“Any sale or long-term lease of the nursery land requires the signature of both partners.”
He pushed a printout of our commercial bank statement across the desk toward me.
