Chapter 21 Wyatt
I wake before the alarm, the way I always do.
The difference is what I wake to. Julian is on his stomach with his face turned toward me and his hand under my shoulder, fingers curled. His mouth is open against the pillow. There is a faint shine of saliva at the corner of it. His hair is on end. He is breathing slow and deep.
I lie still and look at him.
From the light, I think it is past eight o’clock, near as I can tell without turning my head to the clock. I can’t remember the last time that I slept this late. The room smells of him and of me and of the two of us together.
His hand on my shoulder twitches. He makes a small sound. He does not wake.
I get out from under his arm slowly. He resettles. I pull the quilt up to his shoulder the way he did to me on the morning the heat broke, and I get my jeans off the floor and I go down the stairs in my socks.
The kitchen is cold. The picture of our daughter is on the fridge where I put it last night, held up by the tractor magnet that has been on the door since I was Matthew’s age. I stop at the fridge and I look at her. The light in the kitchen is bad enough that I have to lean in a little.
She has not changed since last night. She is still curled. Her hand is still by her face.
I put the kettle on.
The phone rings.
The sound is loud enough in the quiet that I am at the counter with the receiver in my hand before I have thought about it.
“Wyatt Briggs.”
“Wyatt. Yvonne Mears. I’m sorry to call so early.
I had a call last night,” she says. “Late. From a buyer’s agent I have not heard from before.
Out of Denver. They want to come and see the place this morning.
I told them earliest I could do was eleven and they said fine.
They’re part of a big conglomerate so they’re not interested in the house, just the land. ”
I know what that means. One more giant corporation buying up land. It’s been happening for decades. Small ranches like mine just don’t manage forever, not in the world today. Soon all the land in the world is going to be owned by one big corporation, or at least that is how it feels.
“What kind of offer are we looking at?”
She tells me.
It’s a reasonable number. It’s almost exactly what I owe the bank. It’s not what I think the place is worth or what it would have been worth before the Linden Group rolled into town.
“I know it is not what you wanted. But this is the kind of offer that does not come twice. I want to be straight with you about that. They will not be coming back if you say no this morning. I know how these buyers work.”
She hangs up.
I stand at the counter with the receiver still in my hand. The kettle has come to the boil. It clicks off.
Julian’s voice from the doorway, low. “Who was that?”
I turn. He is in the kitchen doorway in last night’s pants and a t-shirt I have not seen, his hair still on end, his eyes still soft from sleep. His feet are bare on the boards. He has come down the stairs without me hearing him.
“There’s a buyer.”
He does not move from the doorway. He looks at me and he waits.
“They want to see the place at eleven,” I say.
“Is it a Linden buyer?”
I had not thought of that.
I put the receiver back in the cradle. I put both hands flat on the counter. The kettle has gone quiet. The fridge is humming behind me. Outside the window the first light is starting to come up over the ridge and the pumps are doing what the pumps do.
“They’ve moved fast,” he says. “I’m guessing they’re going to try to buy before this all goes public.”
I don’t want to take an offer from the Linden Group. I also don’t want to turn it down and end up in a worse position.
Julian lets me think. He goes to the kettle. He picks it up and feels the side of it and decides it is still hot enough, and he takes two mugs off the rack and he makes coffee. He puts mine in front of me and he keeps his in his hand and he stands at the counter beside me.
If I take it I am off the bank’s books by Christmas.
We move into the apartment above Halsey’s cousin’s place in Eastfield.
Caleb finishes school there. Matthew starts at a new school in January.
The baby comes in the spring and we have a roof over our heads and money in the account and I walk away from the place clean.
I drink the coffee. He waits. The kitchen is starting to get light through the window.
I put the mug down.
“I’m not taking it.”
I pick the receiver up. I dial Yvonne. She picks up on the second ring and I tell her no, and she does not argue with me, which surprises me.
Julian goes back up the stairs. I get my jacket off the hook.
The yard is cold. Frost has come down in the night and the grass crunches under my boots.
Biscuit comes out from under the porch with her one good ear up and follows me to the gate of the middle pasture without being asked.
Julian comes out of the house with my old field jacket over the t-shirt because his is still in the car and I have not offered him one.
He is wearing the boots he wore in August, the city ones, which were the wrong boots in August and are the wrong boots now. He does not complain.
I do the cattle. Julian stands at the edge of the trough and he watches and he does what I tell him. I tell him to fill the second trough from the standpipe and he does it.
When we come back in, Matthew is at the kitchen table in his pajamas, hair on end, eating cereal out of the bowl with his fingers. He sees Julian and he goes still with a piece of cereal halfway to his mouth.
“You stayed last night. Are you staying now?”
Julian does not look at me. He keeps his eyes on Matthew. He pulls a chair out from the table and he sits down so he is at Matthew’s level.
“Yes,” he says. “If your brother wants me to.”
Matthew looks at me.
I look at Matthew.
“Yes, I do.”
“Yes you want him to, or yes he is staying?”
“Both.”
He thinks about this. He picks another piece of cereal out of the bowl. He puts it in his mouth.
“Good,” he says.
He goes back to the cereal.
Caleb comes down ten minutes later. He stops in the doorway when he sees Julian at the table.
“Good morning, Caleb.”
“Morning.”
He goes to the cupboard and he gets a mug down. He pours coffee. He sits at the far end of the table. He does not say anything.
He watches Julian over the rim of the mug. Julian does not look at him. Julian drinks his own coffee and he eats a slice of toast that I make him and he answers the next thing Matthew asks him, which is whether architects design barns.
“Sometimes.”
“Could you design our barn?”
“You have a barn. What’s wrong with it? It looks fine.”
“It is not fine. The roof leaks at the back. Wyatt has been saying he is going to fix it for a year.”
“I have been,” I say.
“He has been,” Matthew agrees. “But he hasn’t.”
“I will look at the roof,” Julian says.
“Today?”
“After the cattle. After breakfast. After your brother and I have a conversation we need to have.”
Matthew thinks about this.
“Okay.”
The boys head to school and we’re left alone. And then we have a conversation. Or we start to have a conversation. It ends in bed.
I’m not the type to take a day off. It’s not easy on the ranch when the animals depend on me. Either Caleb has to cover or I have to get someone in.
Still, we spend the day in bed. And the next day. And the day after that.
The following day, Donna turns up after the boys have left for school.
We’re out on the porch, just sitting and planning what we are going to do when the baby arrives.
Donna gets out of the car and hands me a newspaper.
“Well,” she says.
It is the Eastfield Tribune, which is a regional weekly.
The story is front page.
Linden Group senior architect Julian Duffield has filed a sworn affidavit alleging deliberate redaction of the hydrogeology impact assessment for the Parish Ridge development project.
Duffield, who designed the project at schematic stage, states that the published environmental summary materially understates the projected drawdown radius and duration.
The county zoning board confirmed receipt of the affidavit at six twelve a.m. and has scheduled an emergency hearing on the dewatering permits for next Tuesday.
The phone starts to ring.
Neither of us moves to answer it.
In the distance, the sound of the pumps is doing what it has been doing for years, but it is going to stop.
It is not going to stop today. It is not going to stop next week. It might be six months. It might be a year. But it is going to stop. We’re going to make it stop and the water is going to come back, and the south well is going to fill.
Or the affidavit will not do what Julian thinks it will do, and we will be in the apartment over Halsey’s cousin’s place by spring.
I don’t know yet which one of those it is going to be.