Pen Fourteen
Part One: The Parking Lot
I found out in a parking lot.
It was a Thursday in late October, a little after four in the afternoon. I was at the MFA feed store in Clinton, Missouri, loading two sacks of mineral into the back of my truck. The wind was coming hard out of the northwest, the first real cold of the year, and the sky had that low gray look that means sleet by morning.
I had one sack on my shoulder and one in my arms when somebody said my name.
“Troy? Troy Teague?”
I turned around.
It was Glen Paxton. Seventy-something, bowlegged, with a white mustache and a Stetson older than me. He runs about eighty head of black cows south of Deepwater. I’d known him my whole life. He used to buy my dad coffee at the sale barn every Tuesday.
He walked up to me slow. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Sorry about Harlan,” he said.
I set the sack down slow.
I didn’t understand. I thought maybe Dad had gotten hurt. A cow had stepped on him, or he’d taken a fall in the alley. He was seventy-one. It happens.
“What do you mean, Glen?” I asked him.
Glen’s face changed.
He looked at me for a long time. Then he took his hand off my shoulder and took off his hat.
“Son,” he said. “Your dad passed. Better part of two weeks ago.”
I stood there in the parking lot of the MFA with the wind blowing grit in my eyes.
“That’s not right,” I said. “Somebody would’ve called me.”
Glen didn’t say anything.
“Somebody would’ve called,” I said again.
He told me what he knew. Heart attack. In his recliner. On a Sunday night. Charlene found him in the morning.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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