Vera stood by the fence and told it all. Four years earlier, her husband Curtis’s trucking business collapsed, leaving $190,000 in debt against their house. She was too ashamed to tell anyone. The week Daddy entered the home, she began having Eddie’s rent sent to her own account. She told me the money was gone because she never expected me to look, and she told me Eddie only ran cattle so the rent would sound small if anyone ever asked.

Daddy listened with his hand on the post. He said quietly that she was his firstborn and that he would have helped her if she had only asked. What he could not forgive was that his younger daughter had emptied part of her own retirement while Vera cashed his checks. Eddie then stepped forward and offered a folder of copies he had kept. Over three years, he had sent about $84,000 in rent. I had paid $79,200 toward Daddy’s bill in the same time. The numbers sat side by side, and nobody argued with them.

On Monday morning, Daddy called his lawyer, Mr. Landry, and revoked Vera’s power of attorney. He named me in her place, but he insisted that Eddie’s rent be deposited straight into his own checking account from then on. Vera did not fight it. She sold the lake lot she and Curtis owned and repaid me the full $79,200 within sixty days, then put the rest of what she owed into Daddy’s account. Daddy declined to take her to court, on one condition: she and Curtis had to sit down with a debt counselor and stay with it.

I stopped paying the gap that same month, because the rent covered nearly all of it. Glenn and I started driving Daddy out to the farm every Sunday, and Vera joined us after a few weeks. Last fall, Daddy had Eddie set a new fence post beside the old one from 1963, and he scratched the year into it with a nail. He said the land was finally working for the right family.