I should explain about the realtor. Because that part was partly my own fault.
Mom died in her sleep on a Thursday night. Her heart, the doctor said. No warning to speak of.
On Friday, I sat in the arrangements room at the funeral home with my head in my hands, and I said out loud that I did not know what on earth we were going to do with the place.
I meant it the way you mean anything on a day like that. I meant I was tired.
Aunt Lucille heard a decision.
She’s seventy-eight. My mother’s older sister. She left the farm for Lincoln the week she finished high school, and she worked forty-one years in the claims office of an insurance company. In forty-one years, she never once left a file open on her desk overnight.
By Saturday, she’d found a realtor.
By Sunday, she’d moved into Mom’s spare room with a bucket and a box of trash bags.
I didn’t have the strength to stop her. And I thought there’d be time. I thought the worst thing that could happen before Friday was a clean pantry.
The place was coming to me. Mom and Dad had settled that years ago, and Lucille knew it as well as I did. She wasn’t stealing from anybody. In her own mind, she was saving me the trouble.
“Who bought them?” I asked.
“People.”
“Which people, Aunt Lucille?”
“People from the radio. I don’t know them. I don’t know anybody out here anymore.” She pulled the glove back on. “A young woman with a van full of children. A heavy man. Somebody’s hired man in a seed cap.”
“Did you write down a single name?”
“It was cash, honey. You don’t write a receipt for two dollars.”
“Not one name.”
She thought about it.
“One. An old man. Zeller. He said to tell you he’d taken twelve. He said it twice, like I was hard of hearing.”
So there it was.
I couldn’t pick up the telephone and undo it, because there was nobody to call. Forty hens had gone down that lane in the backs of strangers’ cars. And the only record of it was eighty dollars in a bank envelope.
I felt like screaming.
I’m forty-seven years old. I have never screamed at a relative in my life. I came closer that afternoon than I ever hope to come again.
But arguing with Lucille had never once, in my whole lifetime, changed what Lucille had already done. And it wouldn’t bring home a single hen.
And she was right about one thing, though not the way she meant it.
A laying hen in her second spring is worth fifteen dollars to anybody in York County who knows a hen from a hat. Two dollars is what a spent hen brings at the sale barn. The kind that’s headed for somebody’s soup pot.
Whoever answered that radio call had either gotten the bargain of the year, or meant to wring some necks.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.