The funeral casserole dishes were not even dry on the counter before Preston Holloway stood on Cora Beth's porch and gave her until Sunday.
It was Thursday afternoon, two hours after the men from Hebron Baptist had lowered Emmett into the red clay. Cora Beth still wore her black cardigan and held a damp dish towel in her left hand. Out by the pecan trees sat Emmett's blue 1972 Chevrolet pickup, with Preston's leather overnight bag already on the passenger seat.
"Sloane and I talked it over on the drive back from the cemetery," Preston said, resting one polished boot on the bottom porch rail. At fifty, he had Emmett's square jaw and none of his patience. "We want to be fair to you, Cora Beth. Take the bedroom linens, your kitchenware, and whatever books are yours. Have it boxed up by Sunday at four."
Cora Beth looked past him at the forty acres of pasture running toward the creek. "Preston, your father and I lived in this house nineteen years."
"And before that, it was my mother's house for twenty-eight," Preston said. He reached into his coat pocket and jingled the brass key ring he had taken off the mudroom hook that morning before the service. "You didn't say a word when I took the truck keys at nine o'clock. We both know why. You know Dad kept the place in the bloodline."
Cora Beth pressed the dish towel between her palms. When she had seen Preston lift those keys off the brass hook that morning, she had kept quiet because her throat was raw with grief and she had spent her whole life avoiding family quarrels. She had told herself a grieving son just wanted to drive his father's truck to the graveyard one last time.
Now he was using her silence as proof she knew she had no claim to the farmhouse.
"Calvin Odom has your father's trust in his safe in town," Cora Beth said quietly. "Nobody has read it yet."
"Calvin's coming out Sunday at four to hand over the house keys," Preston said. "Sloane and I are bringing a rented box truck from Atlanta so we can load the dining room before dark. Don't make it hard on yourself."
He walked down the steps, got into Emmett's pickup, and backed down the gravel drive between the pecans.
Cora Beth stood alone on the porch. Beside the screen door sat a white wicker table holding the thick green leather-bound guestbook Emmett had kept there for nineteen years, with a brass pen resting along its spine.
Emmett had asked every Sunday caller to write the date, their name, and what the tin thermometer on the porch post read. After Parkinson's stole the steadiness from Emmett's hand five years ago, sixty-one-year-old rural mail carrier Darnell Rivers had signed it every Friday when he brought Emmett's medicine up from the road.
Cora Beth opened the cover to Darnell's neat printing from the Friday before Emmett died: *Oct 10. Darnell Rivers. 71 degrees. Pecan leaves starting to turn.*
On Friday afternoon, a white crossover pulled up beside the hydrangeas.
Sloane Holloway-Reed, forty-seven, came up the steps in cream linen trousers, carrying a roll of yellow masking tape and a black marker. She stepped past Cora Beth into the parlor without knocking.
"I told Preston there was no sense waiting until Sunday to sort the downstairs," Sloane said. "I have to be back in Savannah by Monday noon."
"Sloane," Cora Beth said, "it isn't Sunday, and Mr. Odom hasn't read your father's papers."
"I called Calvin Odom's office at ten," Sloane said, pressing a strip of yellow tape onto the walnut secretary and writing *S.H.R.* in thick black letters. "Calvin wouldn't even read the trust over the phone, which is fine because everybody knows Dad kept the land in the bloodline."
She moved to the parlor bookshelves holding three hundred books Cora Beth had collected over thirty years of driving the Morgan County bookmobile.
"Those books are mine, Sloane," Cora Beth said. "Emmett built those shelves when I retired from the bookmobile."
"The shelves are attached to the wall," Sloane said, sticking yellow tape on the pine molding. "Leave the hardbacks. You can take the paperbacks."
As Sloane turned toward the porch door, her heavy leather purse swung wide and knocked the green porch guestbook off the wicker table. It hit the floorboards face down, its back cover splaying open.
"Careful," Cora Beth said, kneeling to pick it up.
"It's just an old notebook, Cora Beth," Sloane said.
As Cora Beth smoothed the back board shut, she noticed a flat pocket glued inside the back cover that had not been there years ago. It was cut from Calvin Odom's law-office stationery, sealed across the flap with dark red wax, and dated December 2023 in Calvin's handwriting: *Do not break until reading.*
Cora Beth closed the green leather cover and set the book back on the wicker table.
Sunday came in clear and cool. At two o'clock, Cora Beth put on her navy Sunday dress, brewed a pitcher of sweet tea, and left four clean glasses by the kitchen sink. She had not packed a single box.
At three-thirty, Darnell Rivers drove up in his rusty blue Jeep wearing his church slacks and carrying a pound cake from his wife.
"Afternoon, Miss Cora Beth," Darnell said, climbing the steps. "Mr. Calvin called after church and asked if I'd sit on your porch round four."
"Sit right down, Darnell," Cora Beth said. "Have you signed the book today?"
Darnell glanced at the porch thermometer, smiled sadly, and wrote *69 degrees* beside his name.
At 3:45 p.m., gravel popped under heavy tires. Sloane pulled up in Emmett's 1972 pickup, and right behind her Preston backed a twenty-foot rented box truck up the pecan drive until its rear door was six feet from the steps.
Preston climbed out, set a stack of flattened moving boxes on the porch steps, and frowned through the screen door at the unboxed parlor.
"Four o'clock, Cora Beth," Preston said. "You haven't packed a thing."
"No," Cora Beth said. "I haven't."
Down by the road, a silver town car turned in past the mailbox. Preston pointed toward the drive. "There's Calvin Odom now. In five minutes he's going to tell you this farm belongs to us."
Seventy-five-year-old Calvin Odom stepped out of the town car, tucked a worn canvas satchel under his arm, and began climbing the porch steps.