Chapter 2
My father showed up at seven, before I’d finished my coffee, which meant he’d been up since five deciding how to say what he’d come to say.
Gideon Larkin doesn’t knock. He came through the kitchen door the way he’s come through it his whole life, since before it was my kitchen door at all, back when it was still his and my mother’s and I was a girl underfoot at this same table doing homework instead of fence math.
Hung his hat on the peg that’s been his peg since before I was born, third one in from the window, worn smooth in a way none of the other pegs were.
Sat down across from me like it was any Tuesday.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said.
My father looked at the legal pad. He didn’t ask what it was.
There’s only one kind of arithmetic a Larkin does with a plat map and a pencil before sunrise, and he’d done it himself once, forty years back, over a fence dispute that had nothing to do with a marriage, a boundary argument with a Whitfield cousin that had cost him a summer and, according to the story, most of a friendship he never got back.
He poured his own coffee without asking if there was enough.
There’s always enough. I make it strong, the way he taught me to, the way his own father had taught him, three generations of Larkins who’d agreed on one thing across all that time: coffee weak enough to see through wasn’t worth the water.
“I want to say something,” he said, “and I want you to let me finish before you tell me you’ve already decided.”
“Say it, then.”
“You could sell your half to him. Name a fair price, let a lawyer handle the number, be shut of this place and this county inside ninety days.” He set his cup down.
“Or you could divorce him clean, split it a judge’s way instead of a fence you build with your own hands, and go put your name on something new, somewhere his isn’t on the gate.
” He laid both options out flat, like a man reading off a weather report, and somehow that was heavier than if he’d argued for one.
“Those are real choices, Rosalind. I’d help you do the second one today, if that’s the one you want.
Lawyer’s number’s in my truck. I could have him on the phone inside the hour. ”
I looked at him. My father doesn’t offer things he doesn’t mean, and he’d never once in thirty-nine years offered me a lawyer’s number before breakfast.
“I heard what he said same as everyone else,” he went on.
“I’m not asking you to forgive it or explain it away.
I’m asking if you’ve thought through what it costs to stay and fight for ground you already own outright, when there’s an easier road sitting right there.
Nobody in this county would think less of you for taking it.
Man says a thing like that into a live mic, a woman’s got every right to just be done. ”
“I’ve thought it through.” I turned the legal pad so he could read it: fence footage by section, an estimate of crew-days, a name and a number circled at the bottom. “I’m not leaving, Dad. I built too much of what’s out there to hand it over because he made an ugly sound into a live microphone.”
“That’s pride talking.”
“Some of it.” I didn’t flinch from that part.
There wasn’t any use pretending pride wasn’t mixed in with whatever else this was, something colder underneath it, closer to arithmetic than to feeling, that I didn’t have a clean name for yet.
“But I’m not the one who has to leave. Whatever else is true this morning, that part’s settled.
This is my grandfather’s dirt. I’ll run my half better than he’s ever run his, and he can watch me do it from wherever he’s standing. ”
My father turned his coffee cup a quarter-turn on the table. He does that when he’s recalculating.
“A fence,” he said. “Not a sale, and not a divorce.”
“A fence.”
“You know what that does to this family’s name around the county. Everyone at that supper knows exactly why there’s about to be a new line cut through the Teague place. Won’t take two days before Patsy Ondrak’s told it to every customer who walks into that feed store.”
“They already know why. He told them himself. Saved me the trouble.”
That got the corner of his mouth, the nearest thing to a laugh he had in him that morning.
He looked out the window at cattle that didn’t know or care whose name would end up on which side of a line that didn’t exist yet, chewing their way across ground that had outlasted every argument anybody had ever had on top of it.
“Doug Ferris runs a good crew,” he said. “Tell him I said to move you to the front of the list.”
“Already called him. He starts Thursday.”
Whatever crossed his face then wasn’t quite approval, and it wasn’t quite pride. Closer to recognition, like he was looking at a version of himself wearing his daughter’s face. He drank the rest of his coffee in one long pull, done, the conversation mostly over.
“Thursday,” he said, standing, and took his hat off the peg. “I’ll come watch them set the first post.”
I walked him out to his truck, the morning still cool enough to want a jacket, the yard quiet except for a rooster three properties over that had never once, in my whole life, kept proper time. He stopped at the door of his truck, hand on the frame, not turning around right away.
“Your grandmother did about the same thing to your grandfather once,” he said. “Different summer, same land, same kind of trouble. Fenced the orchard off from him for a season over a matter I’m not getting into at your breakfast table. He came around eventually.”
“Did she let him?”
“Eventually.” He tipped his hat brim against the morning sun, climbing up over the barn roof now, throwing long shadows across the yard.
“Took him most of a growing season to earn it, and she made him earn every week of it. That’s the part of the story worth keeping, if you ask me.
Not that she forgave him. That she made him work for it. ”
“What was the matter about? The orchard.”
“Doesn’t matter now. Mattered plenty then.” He climbed into the truck, rolled the window down halfway. “Every marriage worth keeping’s got at least one summer like that in it, Rosalind. Question’s never whether you have one. Question’s what you do with it once it’s here.”
He started the engine. I stood in the yard a while after he’d pulled out, watching his taillights go small down the county road, past the gate sign that still said TEAGUE CATTLE CO.
in eight-year-old paint, past the first stretch of pasture where, by Thursday afternoon, there’d be steel posts standing where no fence had ever needed to stand before.
I went back inside and sat a while longer with the coffee and the legal pad, a phone number written under the fence numbers for a crew who’d be standing on my land by Thursday, and thought one word, clean and whole: good.
Let him watch me build it.
? ? ?
Consuela came up to the house that afternoon to help me go through the linen closet, an errand neither of us needed but both of us wanted, the kind of busywork that gives two women a reason to sit in a room together without looking straight at the thing underneath it.
“You’ve never told me how you ended up here,” I said, folding a stack of towels that didn’t need folding. “Twenty-some years, and I don’t think I’ve ever asked.”
“You never asked because you were a kid when I got here, and kids don’t ask their nanny where she came from.
They just assume she was born standing in the kitchen.
” She said it without any bite in it, just fact, sorting sheets by size, quick and sure and without wasted motion.
“I came up from Nuevo Laredo the year you turned nine. My husband at the time had family working cattle outside San Antonio, said there was steady work this way. There wasn’t, not for him.
There was for me. Your mother hired me to help with you and your brother, and then your mother passed, and somewhere in there I stopped being hired help and started being whatever I am now. Never did find the right word for it.”
“Family,” I said. “That’s the word.”
“Maybe.” She smiled, small, and kept folding.
“My husband went back within the year. Didn’t take to this country the way I did.
We divorced quiet, no fence lines involved, nothing you’d have heard about even if you’d been old enough to notice grown-up business.
I stayed because your father needed the help and because, by then, I’d already decided I liked it here better than anywhere I’d been before.
” She looked at me a beat. “So when I tell you a fence isn’t the craziest thing a person’s ever built out of a bad marriage, I’m not guessing at it, Roz. I know the shape of it firsthand.”
“You never told me any of that.”
“You never asked.” She said it the second time gentler than the first, folding the last of the towels, setting them in a stack square enough to satisfy even me.
“I’m telling you now because I think you need to hear that the ones who build something out of the wreckage instead of just walking away from it, they’re not always wrong to.
Sometimes walking away is right. I did that, my situation.
Sometimes staying and building is right.
Doesn’t come with a rulebook telling you which one’s yours in advance.
You just have to be honest enough with yourself to know it when you see it. ”
“How’d you know yours was walking away?”