Chapter 23 Mara — Day 58
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The sun comes up like it always does. That's the first thing I make myself notice.
Then I make myself get out of bed.
Opal's at the counter kneading dough, forearms floured to the elbow, gray hair pinned up in a way that isn't neat and isn't trying to be. She doesn't look at me when I come in. She tips her chin toward the pot.
“Coffee's fresh.”
“Thanks.”
“You want eggs.”
“I'll grab something in the barn.”
“You'll eat eggs,” Opal says. “Sit down.”
I sit. Two minutes later she sets a plate in front of me. Eggs. A slice of yesterday's rosemary bread toasted brown. A smear of butter. She doesn't ask how I slept. She doesn't ask if I'm all right. She fills my mug, sets it beside my hand, and goes back to her dough.
I eat.
It's Opal's way of saying, I'm still here, girl. You're still here. Eat your food.
I do.
Renata comes at noon in the faded red CALDER FEED truck, mud splashed up the doors. Doesn't ring the bell. Walks straight into the mudroom and drops a paper bag on the table.
“Tomatoes. From my aunt's garden, not the store. Also I'm here every day this week. Save your breath telling me you're fine.”
“I'm fine.”
“Told you.”
She's already opening a cabinet like she owns it. Copper-red hair shoved into a rough knot. Cheeks pink from driving with the window down.
“I'm making lunch. You're sitting.”
“I've got fence to check.”
“You've got a friend who drove forty miles and doesn't feel like arguing. Fence can wait a sandwich.”
I sit.
She makes grilled cheese. I eat two. She doesn't ask.
That's how Day 58 goes.
Day 59, she's back before ten with a thermos and the newspaper she stole off her aunt's porch.
Day 60 too. She fills the quiet with things I can stand.
A shipment of wrong bit hangers at the feed store.
A mare her cousin's selling out past Fort Davis.
The story of the man who tried to return a broken bridle last Tuesday and how she made him regret it.
Nothing that needs a real answer. Sometimes she just sits on the porch drinking coffee she made in my kitchen while the light dies over the west pasture.
When she leaves she says the same thing.
“I'll be back tomorrow.”
“You don't have to.”
“That's not why I'm coming.”
“Ren.”
“What.”
“Thank you.”
“Hush. That's how it works. That's how it's supposed to work. I owed you about eight years of this. I'm going to be here a while.”
I let her.
Cassia drives out on Day 60 with a tin of oatmeal-molasses cookies and a stack of three used paperbacks. She hugs me at the door a long time without saying anything. Then she puts the tin on the table and steps back.
“I'm not going to ask you a single question,” she says. “I brought cookies. I brought books. I'll leave. Unless you want me to stay.”
“Stay a little.”
She stays two hours. We don't talk much. She reads on the couch with her feet tucked under her. I sit at the kitchen table paying invoices with a pen that keeps skipping. When she leaves she hugs me again at the door.
“You look tired.”
“I'm working.”
“That's not the same as sleeping.”
“I know.”
“Just checking.”
I stand on the porch until her little white car is a spot on the county road. Then I go back inside and finish the invoices.
Thayer doesn't say anything at all.
He's in the barn when I come out at first light on Day 61 with two buckets.
He takes one without a word. We do the stalls together.
He's slow and steady, ex-rodeo shoulders held careful, gray at his temples catching the low sun through the barn door.
When Junior tries to bite my sleeve Thayer clucks at him and Junior stops.
When I drop a hoof pick Thayer picks it up and hands it back.
He doesn't ask what happened. Whatever he's guessed, he keeps it. I've never loved him more.
Rafe wanders into the barn around ten with his arm in the new brace. Sling's gone. Doctor cleared him for light work three days back and he's been trying to prove it ever since.
“Hey, boss.”
“Hey.”
“I can fork hay one-handed. Tell him.” He tips his chin at Thayer.
“You can fork hay two-handed as long as one of them's careful,” Thayer says. “Go get Orin. Show him the salt block rotation.”
“I know the salt block rotation.”
“So show him.”
Rafe grins, then the grin drops when he looks at me. He doesn't ask either. He does this quiet thing with his shoulders where he squares them up like he's the man of the place — twenty-six years old, one working arm.
“You need anything today, boss, you holler.”
“I'll holler.”
“You promise?”
“Rafe.”
“Just promise.”
“I promise.”
He nods, satisfied, and goes to find Orin. Thayer meets my eye over the top of Vespers's stall and doesn't quite smile.
“He worships you.”
“He worships the ranch.”
“Same thing to him.”
I lift a bale. Thayer takes the other end without being asked. We stack it.
Day 62 comes cold and clear. I'm in the office off the mudroom, going through my father's file cabinet for the third time this week — insurance, deeds, water rights, tax stubs from 1994 — when the phone rings on the wall. The ranch line, not my cell.
“Vale Ranch.”
“Mara. It's Veda.”
Veda Rowan's voice is low and dry, the voice of a woman who spent thirty years on a bench in Alpine listening to people lie and telling them apart. She was my father's friend. Poker on Thursday nights. At the funeral she was the one who told me, “You call me, girl. For anything.”
“Judge.”
“Not judge. Retired six years. Get it right.”
“Veda.”
“Better. Sit down.”
“I'm sitting.”
“Then listen. I've spent three days on the old deed. The one your daddy filed in eighty-seven when he took over from your grandfather. You got it in front of you?”
“I've got it here somewhere.”
“Find it.”
I put the phone on my shoulder and dig. I find the deed in the second drawer, in a manila folder labeled in my father's careful capital letters.
“Got it.”
“Turn to the third page. Metes and bounds. Read me the part about the eastern line.”
I read it. I've read it before. It's a wall of surveyor's language I never fully learned.
“Now,” Veda says. “The parcel that borders old McKay's spread on the east. You know the one. The wash and the mesquite thicket.”
“Yeah.”
“The recorded deed is clean,” Veda says.
“The mistake happened when the county digitized the parcel maps.
Somebody entered one survey call fourteen hundred feet west and attached a hundred and twelve acres of your east strip to McKay's tax parcel.
Your deed, the original survey, the fence, and seventy years of grazing records all say Vale. The computer map doesn't.”
I sit down harder than I meant to.
“Say that again.”
“About a hundred and twelve acres. Marginal ground, but it has always been inside your recorded boundary. The automated appraisal has valued it at zero because the assessor's GIS layer dropped it from your parcel.”
“That can't —”
“It can, and I checked it three times. We file an assessor-map correction with the original survey, a surveyor's certificate, and your affidavit of continuous possession.
The county isn't giving you land; it's correcting the database to match the title.
It won't erase the arrears or kill the loan. It will change the collateral number the bank is allowed to use.”
I'm quiet a long time. Veda lets me be quiet.
“McKay's family,” I say. “Do they —”
“McKay's sons get notice because the bad map touched their parcel. They live in Dallas and haven't worked that ground in fifteen years. They can object, but the recorded calls are against them. If they try, I'll handle it pro bono.”
“Veda.”
“Don't.”
“Thank you.”
“Don't thank me yet. Come into town tomorrow morning. Bring the deed. We'll file. Then you and I are walking across the street and you're going to talk to Selene at the bank.”
“All right.”
“Wear a clean shirt. You're a landowner. Look like one.”
“I always look like a landowner.”
“Wear a clean one anyway.”
She hangs up.
I stand in the mudroom with the deed in my hand and the phone still on my shoulder for I don't know how long. My heart's a hammer in my ribs. I don't cry. I laugh once, low, like I got hit with something.
Then I go find Opal.
She's at the sink. She looks up.
“What.”
“Judge Rowan called.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There's a hundred-and-twelve-acre error on the county map. The deed says the east strip has always been mine. Veda thinks correcting the appraisal can buy time from the bank.”
Opal turns the faucet off. Wipes her hands on the towel over her shoulder. Looks at me a long second.
“Well,” she says. “There you go.”
“That's it?”
“What'd you want me to say.”
“I don't know.”
“I could say told you so.”
“You never said any of this.”
“I said the ranch would take care of you if you kept taking care of the ranch. That's my version.”
“Opal.”
“Mm.”
“Come here.”
She comes. I hug her hard. She smells like flour and coffee and the lavender she keeps in her drawer. She pats my back twice and pushes me off before either of us can say anything that would embarrass us.
“Go put on a clean shirt,” she says.
“Not you too.”
“Wear the blue one.”
I wear the blue one.
Day 63. The drive into Alpine takes an hour and change. I don't listen to the radio. I don't rehearse. I've been rehearsing every conversation for a week and none of them went the way I planned. I just drive.
Veda meets me on the courthouse steps in a wool coat older than I am. She hands me a coffee. We go inside.
Filing the correction packet takes forty minutes and eighty-seven dollars.
A clerk stamps Veda's affidavit. A second clerk stamps the surveyor's certificate and sends the map amendment to the assessor.
Veda watches like she's observing an arraignment.
On the way out she pats the manila folder under her arm.
“That land was always yours,” she says. “Now the county's computer knows it too.”
“Feels smaller than I expected.”
“It always does. Big things are quiet.”
We walk across the street to Sul Ross Bank. Selene sees me through the glass and stands up before I open the door.