Chapter 2 #2
“Because there wasn’t anything under the anger worth building on.
No orchard fence in it, if you follow me.
Just a man tired of me, already set on a different life, and me deciding I wanted this one instead.
” She put the towels away, closed the closet, turned to face me square.
“You, I’m not so sure about yet. Man built you a fence’s worth of reasons to leave.
But I watched you at that dessert table, Roz.
Whatever’s under your anger, it isn’t empty.
I’ve known you since you were nine years old. I know the difference in your face.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. She didn’t wait for one, just patted my arm once, businesslike, and went to go start supper, leaving me standing in a hallway that smelled like clean linen and old wood, turning over twenty years of a story I’d never once thought to ask for.
? ? ?
My brother called from Denver that same night, later than he usually called, which told me before he said a word that he’d already heard.
Nate had left the ranch at eighteen, the year I turned sixteen, gone off to a business school neither of us had grown up expecting a Larkin to attend, and he’d built a life out there running logistics for a shipping company, a life with none of the mud or the calving math or the weight of land that had been in the family since 1911.
We loved each other. We just didn’t understand each other’s lives much anymore, having drifted, friendly about it, into separate versions of what a good life was supposed to look like.
“Dad called me,” he said. “Told me what Boone said. Told me about the fence.”
“News travels fast, even to Denver.”
“Dad doesn’t call unless it’s serious. You know that.” A pause, a man deciding how much of his own opinion to offer about a life he’d chosen not to live. “You okay?”
“I’m managing.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know it’s not.” I sat at the kitchen table, the same table where Consuela and I had folded towels that afternoon, the house gone quiet around me.
“I don’t fully know how to answer the other question yet, Nate.
I’m building a fence. I’m running the operation.
I’m getting up every morning and doing the next right thing in front of me.
Some days that feels like managing fine.
Some days it feels like something else.”
“I could come out. Take some time off, help however you need it.”
“You hate this place, Nate.” I said it gently, no accusation in it, just a fact between siblings who’d never pretended otherwise with each other.
“You’ve hated the mud and the hours since you were twelve years old.
I love you for offering, but you’d be miserable inside a week, and I’d spend the whole time worrying about your misery on top of my own mess. ”
He laughed, short, a little rueful, because he knew I was right and had known it before he’d even offered.
“Fair. I’m not built for it, never was. But I could still come out for a weekend.
Not to help with cattle. Just to sit on a porch with my sister and not talk about Boone Teague for forty-eight straight hours, if that’s something you’d want. ”
“That, I’d want.”
“Then I’m coming. Not this month, work’s a mess right now, but soon.
” Something in his voice went quieter, more serious, the businessman’s easy patter dropping away for a second.
“I’ll say this much, Roz. I always thought you got the better end of the deal, staying.
Dad’s operation, the land, all of it. I used to tell people at school I grew up on a ranch and then never mention I couldn’t wait to leave it.
Felt like a coward’s version of pride, telling it that way.
You actually stayed and built something.
I just talk about the place I’m from at dinner parties. ”
“You built your own thing, Nate. Doesn’t have to be dirt under your fingernails to count.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced, but he let it go, the way we both tended to let go of the harder threads of a conversation once they’d been acknowledged rather than fully resolved.
“Take care of yourself out there. Call me before you do anything you can’t undo.
And Roz. Boone never did know what he had.
Hope he figures it out, for your sake. Hope you’re okay either way it goes. ”
We talked another few minutes about nothing much, the easy catching-up of two siblings who loved each other across a distance neither of them had quite closed.
When I hung up I set the phone face-down on the table.
For the first time since the harvest supper my family had gathered itself around me, scattered and imperfect as it was, every last one finding their own way to say the same thing: you’re not doing this alone.
? ? ?
I drove out to tell Deacon myself, before he could hear it secondhand from anybody else, finding him already up and working at the equipment shed despite the early hour, same as most mornings.
Deacon decided decades ago that dawn belonged to the working day whether the rest of the world agreed with him or not.
“Heard something happened at the supper,” he said, before I’d gotten a word out, wiping grease from his hands with the same rag he was forever carrying. “Didn’t hear what, exactly. Figured you’d tell me when you were ready, or I’d hear it eventually anyway, same as everything else out here.”
So I told him, plain, the whole of it. Deacon listened still and attentive, not interrupting, his face giving away almost nothing until I’d finished.
“I’m fencing it,” I said, at the end. “Full survey line, my half from his. Doug Ferris’s crew starts Thursday.”
“That’s a big undertaking.”
“I know it is.”
“Didn’t say it was a bad one.” He set the rag down and met my eyes head-on, plain, no hurry in it, same as he had for fifteen years working this place alongside me.
“Your grandfather ran this operation on the principle that a man’s word and a man’s actions ought to match up, or the word wasn’t worth much.
Sounds like Boone’s actions finally caught up to something he’d been saying with his silence for a good while now, even if he never said it plain till that microphone caught him.
Fencing it seems like a fair response to a man showing you, finally, what he actually thinks. ”
“You’re not going to tell me to think it over? Sleep on it a few more nights?”
“Wouldn’t do any good if I did. You’ve got your grandfather’s particular stubbornness, same as your father’s got it, same as I expect his father had it before him.
When a Larkin decides something, sleeping on it just delays the decision, doesn’t change it.
” The barest suggestion of a smile crossed his face, there and gone.
“I’ll tell Reyes and whoever else needs telling to expect a fence crew Thursday.
You need anything from me before then, you know where to find me. ”
“Thank you, Deacon.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Haven’t done anything worth thanking.
” He picked the rag back up, already turning back to whatever he’d been working on before I’d arrived, the conversation closed as clean as it had opened.
“Go on and get some rest, boss. Looks like you could use it, and Thursday’s going to ask a lot of you before it’s through. ”
I drove back to the house carrying that small, steady vote of confidence alongside everything else I hauled that week. It weighed as much as anything my father or Faye had offered, coming from someone who rarely said anything he didn’t mean.
? ? ?
Consuela and I spent that first Wednesday evening going through the house room by room, a task with nothing to do with the fence that still felt like part of the same reckoning, taking inventory of a life about to change shape whether I was ready or not.
“You don’t have to decide anything about the house tonight,” she said, standing in the doorway of the bedroom Boone and I had shared, watching me look at it with an expression she recognized from long practice. “Just wanted you to see it plain, once, before Thursday’s noise takes over everything.”
“It looks the same as it always has.”
“Rooms usually do, right up until the day they don’t.
” She came in, sat on the edge of the bed, the same bed she’d helped make a thousand times over the years, tucking corners square without thinking about it.
“I’ve watched this room a long time, Roz.
Watched you two young and easy in it, that first year.
Watched it get quieter, slow, the way rooms do when the people in them stop reaching for each other as often as they used to.
I noticed before you did, probably. That’s usually how it goes, for the people watching from the doorway instead of living it from the inside. ”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Wasn’t my place, not until you asked, or until something forced the question the way that microphone did.
” She looked around the room, careful, cataloguing a life she’d helped hold together for two decades.
“I’ll say something now, though, since you’re asking with your face even if you haven’t asked with your mouth.
This room’s not broken, Roz. It’s just paused.
Whatever you decide about the rest of it, the room itself is just waiting to find out what happens next, same as the rest of us. ”
I sat beside her a while in a room that held eleven years of ordinary life. Not broken. Just paused. The bed still made, the window going dark.