Dad Chose Three Husbands, but His Best Friend Crossed Them Out novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Veto
At her father's will reading, the lawyer reads a letter naming three approved husbands, and his best friend Amos Tuck stands, crosses out all three and says no; Karin walks out and gets into his truck.
The lawyer read my father's letter in the voice people use at funerals.
"Three men," he said. "In this order. Any one of whom Karin may marry before she turns twenty-five."
He read the first name.
It was Brent Colby, and Brent smiled at me from the front row, sure of himself.
Then my father's best friend stood up, took the pen off the lawyer's blotter, and crossed all three names out.
He didn't look at me while he did it.
He drew three hard lines through my father's handwriting, one under the other.
"No," he said.
The room went so quiet I heard the radiator tick.
I had been sitting in that leather chair for twenty minutes, hearing about my own life like it was somebody else's cattle.
Nobody had asked me one question.
My father had been dead eleven weeks.
The lawyer had already told us the terms.
The Arvidson ranch, twenty-three hundred acres on the river, would be mine outright on my twenty-fifth birthday.
Or sooner, if I married a man on my father's list, and Amos Tuck signed his approval.
Until then Amos was trustee, which meant he ran my family's land and I got a vote on nothing.
He was forty-six.
He had come to our place at seventeen as a hired boy and stayed twenty-nine years.
He was my father's oldest friend, and he had just crossed out my father's last wish with the lawyer's pen.
"Mr. Tuck," the lawyer said, "you are entitled to cross them out. That is what approval means."
"I know what it means."
Janet Colby was on her feet.
She was fifty-eight, with short silver hair, turquoise earrings and a church cardigan.
She had never once been told no by a man in a work shirt.
"Nils and my late husband shook on this twelve years ago," she said.
"Brent will put cattle on the river pasture this afternoon, as they agreed."
"Brent won't," Amos said.
"You are a hired man."
"I'm the trustee."
She came around the table and put her hand on my arm.
"Karin, honey, you tell him."
Her nails dug into my sleeve.
I looked at the handwritten page lying open in front of me, a sheet torn out of the ranch ledger.
It was numbered one to four in my father's backward-slanting left-hander's scrawl.
Three names sat above the numbers, now with Amos's lines through them.
Next to the "4." there was only a grey smear where somebody had rubbed pencil out with a thumb.
The lawyer had said the will counted three.
"Take your hand off her," Amos said.
He said it quietly.
He didn't move any closer.
Janet's hand came off my arm.
Brent finally stood up, still smiling, and that smile had a lot of teeth in it.
"Karin," he said. "Tell your hired man to sit down and let a family conversation happen."
I looked at Brent.
I thought about every time he had put his hand on the small of my back at a branding or a funeral supper.
"Brent," I said, "you read that list before I did."
His smile slipped half an inch.
"Your mother read it. You've been to my house twice since January with a casserole and a tape measure."
Somebody in the back coughed to hide a laugh.
"I'm not done with this," Brent said.
"You were never started," I said.
Amos picked up his hat from the empty chair beside him.
He had not said another word to me.
He walked around the table toward the door, and his sleeve brushed my shoulder as he passed.
It was a plain brush of cloth, and heat went through me anyway.
At the door he stopped and turned, and for the first time that morning his eyes found mine.
Brown eyes, with a scar through the right eyebrow I'd known all my life.
I knew that look from calving season.
It was the look he gave a heifer he was about to move before she hurt herself.
Then he put his hand flat on the small of my back to guide me through the door.
He did it in front of the Colbys and the lawyer and everyone.
His hand was huge, and it didn't push.
It just stayed there, warm through my shirt, and I felt every finger.
I'd been guided through doors by men all my life, and I had never wanted to turn around and bite one.
The parking lot was cold and bright, and he walked to his truck without checking if I followed.
He opened the driver's door and stopped with one boot on the running board.
"I'll bring your truck out to the ranch tonight," he said. "Go home with the neighbor who offered."
"I'm not going home with the neighbor."
He looked at me over the door.
"Arvidson."
"You crossed out three men for me, in front of Janet Colby, without asking me one thing."
He didn't flinch.
"Yes."
"Then you can explain it to me in your truck."
I walked around the hood, opened the passenger door, and climbed in.
Behind me, through the lawyer's window, I could see Brent Colby watching.
I shut the door.
"Drive," I said. "And start with why."
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