Chapter 7 The Decision
She made the decision on the tenth day, in the kitchen of the Vance place with the stove going and the mountains in the window, while James Breck was telling her about the fence line on the east pasture that needed work before spring.
She did not interrupt the fence line account to announce the decision. She received the fence line account with the full attention she always gave his accounts, asked the relevant questions, understood the relevant implications. Then, when he had finished, she said:
"I'm staying."
He looked at her.
"I've decided," she said. "I'm staying. I know I don't know what I'm doing and I know the practical challenges are significant and I know you think I should sell and I know you are probably right in the rational sense. But I am staying."
He was quiet for a moment. She watched him process this — the slight shift in his expression that was not surprise exactly but was a recalibration, the moment of a man updating his picture of a situation.
"All right," he said.
She had expected argument. She had been prepared for argument — for the rational case restated, for the catalogue of challenges, for the reminder that she had no experience and ten weeks of savings and no plan. She had not expected all right.
"That's it?" she said.
"What did you expect?" he said.
"More argument," she said.
"You've heard the argument," he said. "You decided despite it. Arguing further won't change a decision that didn't rest on the argument in the first place."
She looked at him. "You understand that," she said.
"I understand that some decisions are about the feeling rather than the calculation," he said. "I made one of those myself when I came to this valley."
"The leaving the flat land," she said.
"Yes," he said.
They sat in the kitchen in the December morning with the decision between them, specific and now real, the way decisions became real when they were said aloud to someone who received them seriously.
"What happens now," she said, "with your arrangement? With my uncle's arrangement. You worked the land expecting to buy it."
He looked at the table. This was the territory they had been circling for ten days, the underlying complication that neither of them had fully addressed.
He had told her about the land and the valley and the community and his wife, and she had listened and asked questions and told him she was staying, and now they were at the thing underneath all of it.
"That arrangement doesn't hold," he said. "Legally. As Mr. Crane told you."
"I know that," she said. "I'm asking what you think ought to happen. Not what's legal. What's right."
He was quiet for a moment. She was asking him to be honest about his own position in a way that most people would not have asked. Most people would have managed around it, would have let the legal fact absorb the awkward question.
"I think," he said, carefully, "that I worked the land in good faith based on your uncle's word, and that the appropriate acknowledgment of this is either compensation for the work or a right of first purchase at fair value."
"Both seem right to me," Holly said.
He looked at her.
"I don't have the money to compensate you for a season's work," she said.
"I have approximately nine weeks of savings and no income until I establish something.
So I can't compensate you for the work, not now.
" She paused. "But I can give you the right of first purchase if I ever do sell.
I'll put that in writing with Mr. Crane. "
He was quiet.
"Is that adequate?" she said.
"It's fair," he said. The word was chosen carefully. Not the same as adequate or acceptable or even what he had wanted. Fair.
"I'm sorry," she said. "For the position you're in. You did everything right and it came out wrong through no fault of yours or mine or my uncle's, and I'm sorry about that."
He looked at her. She said this the way she said everything — directly, without excess sentiment, meaning it precisely and nothing beyond precisely.
"Thank you," he said.
They sat for a moment longer in the kitchen that was now Holly Vance's kitchen, in the house that was now Holly Vance's house, on the land that was Holly Vance's land, and the mountains were in the window and the stove was doing its work and the decision was made and real and the complication of it had been addressed as well as it could be addressed, and what was left was the life.
"I need help," she said. "I know I need help. I can't manage this alone and I know it. I'm going to have to hire someone, or find someone willing to work for a share, or something I haven't thought of yet."
"Something you haven't thought of yet," he said.
"I find I say that a lot," she said. "There are apparently many things I haven't thought of yet."
"In Colorado in December," he said, "the list of things you haven't thought of yet will get shorter quickly."
She looked at him. His expression had shifted — the composed management was still there but underneath it was something she hadn't seen before in quite this form. It was, she thought, humor. Very dry and very contained, but present.
"Is that a reassurance or a warning?" she said.
"Both," he said.
She looked at the mountains and thought: I have made my decision. Whatever comes next, I have made my decision, and making the decision was right, and here I am in the right place doing the right thing and the rest is the rest.
"Will you keep coming?" she said. "In the mornings. To tell me things."
He looked at her directly. "Yes," he said. "I'll keep coming."
"Good," she said. "I still have a great deal to learn."
"You do," he said.
"So do I," she said, which was not about the land or the valley or any of the practical things, and she said it looking at the mountains and he said nothing, which was also true and which was its own kind of answer.