Page 12 of Top Shelf

“Yes. But Farfar was explicit. The first grandson is you—then Anton.”

“And does Freja think I should come home?”

“She thinks you should come home, fight Anton in the driveway, marry the first sensible woman you find, and then apologize to everyone after.”

“That is not a plan.”

“She has amended it three times since breakfast.”

“Tell her I wouldn’t fight him in the driveway.”

“I did. She called you a coward.”

“That sounds like Freja.”

“She also cried and said she loves you.”

“That sounds less like Freja.”

A slow ache moves through me, because my sister should not be crying over this. Mamma should not be calling me from across the world with careful words. And Farfar should not have written a marriage condition into a will like we are living inside some old Swedish folktale where land, family, and duty all get tied together.

“What will you do?” Mamma asks.

I look back at the clinic. There are no more blurs of pink through the windows.

“I do not know.”

The question has been following me for weeks. Across flights and through games. Into the gym and onto the ice and then into sleep.

I am thirty-one years old. I have money and a career and a condo in Denver. I do not need land in Sweden with a meadow that turns multicolored in summer. I do not need the kitchen table where Mormor taught me to roll dough, or the orchard where I picked summer fruit for Mamma. I do not need the lake where Freja pushed me off the dock when I was twelve because I said her flower crown looked stupid. The same lake where Pappa taught me how to skate in winter.

And I do not need the yellow room upstairs where Farfar kept every postcard I sent from America, even the ugly ones from road cities I forgot five minutes after I left them. I do not need any of it.

That is what makes the thought of losing it so painful. None of it is necessary. All of it is beloved.

I rest my free hand on Priscilla’s handlebar and let my thumb follow the worn place on the grip. An Indian Bobber Scout I bought my rookie year in Nevada from a man with a sunburnt neck. I rode her back to Denver through heat and dust and the open road of the desert. Priscilla was not practical, but I loved her immediately.

Maybe this is why Anton and I will never agree. He can look at the potential of Solvik and see the profitability. I look at the memories filled in Solvik and see the history.

“Viktor? You are quiet.”

“Sorry.” I lean my hip against Priscilla and look toward the clinic doors again. “I had an unusual morning.”

“Oh?”

“A woman threatened to haunt me with a PowerPoint presentation.”

There is a pause, and then my mother laughs. It bubbles through the phone, and for a second, I am back at Solvik in the kitchen with morning light streaming through the windows and catching the dust.

“She sounds sensible,” Mamma says.

“She is terrifying.”

“Good…” Mamma is quiet for several seconds. “You could come home, you know.”

“And do what?”

“Stand in the meadow. Remember why you are fighting for it.”