Chapter 1 #2
"Not to them. Your grandfather's name is on that deed.
" He breathes. "I went everywhere else first. Every bank in the valley.
The co-op. An old contact in Fresno. Everyone said no.
" He sets the cup down very carefully. "Then a man said yes.
He sat right there in that chair and said yes like it was nothing, like he'd been waiting for me to get to him.
I shook his hand. I was relieved." A long breath.
"I didn't ask what yes was going to mean for us. "
There's nothing to say to that. He knows it. Hollis knows it. The whole kitchen goes still.
"Who?" I say. But I already know. I knew it in the round pen. I knew it from the boots.
"Isaak."
The name sits on the table between us.
"How much do we owe him?"
My father says a number.
It's not a number I have. It's not a number anyone I've ever met has. It's got a comma in a place I didn't know our family's commas went. Hollis makes a small sound by the stove, turns, looks out the window at the arena like the answer might be out there with the colt.
"Okay," I say, because somebody has to make a word and Dad's gone gray. "Okay. So we sell. The studs, the equipment, carve off whatever land we can. We make a plan, we pay the man, we keep the ground. That's all this is. It's numbers. We've done numbers before."
"It's past numbers, baby."
"Nothing's past numbers."
"He doesn't want the money." My father looks up at me. His eyes are wet and furious, furious at himself, the worst kind. "I tried to give him a payment plan. I offered him the south forty. The mares. Your truck, God help me, I offered him your truck. He doesn't want any of it."
"Then what does the man want?"
I stop.
Because Hollis has turned all the way around.
He's an old man who's buried two wives and a son.
He has never in my life looked afraid, but he looks afraid now.
And my father has set the coffee cup down at last, both hands flat on the table on either side of it, like he doesn't trust himself not to throw it across the room.
"He wants you," my father says.
The screen door screams.
I don't have to turn around. The colt taught me that an hour ago, the body before the boots.
I feel the room rearrange itself. Hollis straightens.
My father sits up. The air in my own kitchen reorganizes around the man.
He fills the doorway. He took his time coming up from the pen, gave us our scene. Now he's here for the curtain.
"Mr. Calloway." Isaak's voice is gentle, and the gentleness scares me worse than shouting would. He doesn't need volume. The whole room has already gone quiet to hear him. "I told you I'd let you say it."
"You said you'd let me say it to her alone."
"I changed my mind. She should hear the rest from me.
" He steps inside. The screen bangs shut behind him.
He wears no hat to take off, so he just stands there in the wreck of my family's kitchen, in a suit that could have re-roofed the house, and he looks at me.
Only me. The way he looked at me in the pen, the patient question. Except now I know what the question is.
"It's a marriage," he says. "A real one, legal, in front of God and the county.
You'll have everything. The ranch clears today, every cent, my name on it instead of the bank's.
Your father keeps his ground, his men, his trophies, his dignity.
Those three old men keep their jobs and their cabins until they die in them.
You'll never see another bill as long as you live. "
"And you get?"
"You."
He says it flat and true, a fact about the world I'm now expected to live in.
I stand. The old chair scrapes. My hands are steady, which surprises me, because the rest of me is up near the ceiling somewhere, watching this happen to a girl in muddy boots who looks a lot like me.
"Get out of my house," I say.
"Nora." My father reaches for my wrist.
"Not you." I don't take my eyes off Isaak. "Him."
And he does. He inclines his head, half an inch, like I've said something reasonable, like I've made a fair counteroffer in a deal he already knows the ending of.
He turns for the door. At the door, hand on the screaming frame, the gold morning behind him lighting up the gray at his temples, he stops.
He looks back at me over his shoulder. The budget smile is gone.
He's looking at me the way he looked at me in the pen, content to wait, certain I'll come around.
"Think it over," he says. "Take all the time you want."
"I don't need time. I'll tell you now."
He waits. He actually waits, one shoulder against my family's doorframe, in no more hurry to hear my answer than he was to climb the porch steps an hour ago.
I look at my father, who has a whole life in his face.
The south forty. The mares. Hollis's cabin, the star I carved in this chair, my mother's porch she never fixed.
All of it rides on whatever I say in this kitchen, my boots still wet from a horse named Cricket.
I look at Hollis, who taught me to rope.
I look at the cracked trophy that cost us money we didn't have, standing a half-inch too tall because some things you don't let break.
Then I look at the man in the doorway who wants to buy me like a broodmare. The man who lent us the rope two years ago, then waited, smiling, while we hanged ourselves on it.
"I'm not for sale," I tell him. "I'm not a horse you spotted at auction. So whatever you think you're buying, Mr. Radulov, you'd better hear me now. There's no money in the world that closes this deal."
He looks at me a long moment.
"I know," he says. He sounds, God help me, almost happy about it. "No money in the world. You have no idea what that does to a man like me."
The screen door screams. He's gone. And I'm still standing.