Chapter 23 Mara — Day 58 #2
Selene Hart's maybe forty-four, fair, plain-featured in a good way, kind eyes, gray cardigan she wears in every weather. She's been the loan officer on my file since my father was alive. She's never lied to me. She's also never been able to help me the way she wanted to.
She waves us into her office and shuts the door.
“Mara. Judge.”
“Selene.”
“Sit.”
I sit. Veda stays standing, one hand on the back of my chair.
“I've got something to tell you,” I say.
“Go ahead.”
I lay it out. The deed. The original survey. The digitization error. The correction packet filed that morning. I don't rush and I don't oversell. When I'm done, I put the manila folder on her desk.
Selene opens it. Reads the top page. Turns the page. Looks up.
“Mara.”
“I know.”
“This is —”
“I know.”
She closes the folder. Sets her hands flat on top of it. Looks at me a long moment, then at Veda, then back at me.
“There's something else you should know.”
“OK.”
“I wasn't going to tell you unless you asked. I'm going to tell you now.”
Veda's hand tightens a fraction on the chair back.
“Three days ago,” Selene says, “the bank's parent company in Houston got a call from a law firm in Toronto.
A big one. Name I've heard on the news for other reasons. They asked, formally, on the record, whether the terms of your loan — the rate, the reset clause, the cure window — were compliant with Texas farm-lending regulations.”
I don't say anything.
“They were polite. They were also thorough. Houston sent me an email first thing this morning. Between you and me, they don't want to be in a compliance review. They especially don't want to be in one about a divorced woman's ranch her daddy left her.”
“Selene —”
“I don't know who they are,” Selene says, and looks me right in the eye. “I don't know why they made the call. I'm not asking. I want you to hear me. I am not asking.”
I hold her look.
“OK.”
“With the title correction you filed this morning,” she says, “and — with the authorization from Houston on my desk today — I am authorized to extend your cure window by ninety days. Effective immediately. In writing. I have the paperwork ready if you'll sign.”
Veda makes a small sound behind me I'm pretty sure is a laugh.
“You had the paperwork ready,” I say.
“I had it ready last week. I was waiting for a reason I could put on the form.”
“You've got two.”
“I've got two.”
She slides a page across the desk. I read it. It's what she says it is. My hand shakes a little on the pen and I make it stop and I sign my name.
Ninety days.
Ninety days I didn't have when I woke up this morning.
Selene takes the page back. Dates it. Stamps it. Slides me a copy. Then she stands and shakes my hand across the desk and holds it a beat longer than a banker usually does.
“Go home,” she says. “Do your work. Come back in thirty days and we'll talk about a payment plan you can actually make.”
“You want me to keep the ranch.”
“I want a lot of things, Mara. Most of them I don't get to say out loud in this office. That one I'll say.”
“Thank you.”
“You did the work. Not me. Not — anybody else. You brought me the deed.”
“Yeah.”
“Go on.”
Veda walks me to my truck.
“Well,” she says.
“Well.”
“You know who called Houston.”
“I've got a guess.”
“You want to talk about it.”
“No.”
“Fair enough.”
She squeezes my elbow, hard, then lets go.
“Chambers, day after tomorrow,” she says. “I want to run through the McKay boys in case they get feisty. Nine a.m. Wear whatever you want. I don't care about your shirt.”
“Thanks, Veda.”
“You did good, Mara.”
“You did the finding.”
“You did the not-quitting. Harder part.”
She walks off toward the courthouse in her wool coat. I stand next to my truck in the Alpine wind a minute, paperwork in my hand. Then I get in and drive home.
Day 64, I ride out to the east fence line and walk the strip on foot.
A hundred and twelve acres of mesquite and pale grass and a dry wash you could hide a truck in.
Nothing to farm. Nothing to lose. Mine. The wind is high and the sky's that blue we get out here in late fall, so blue it hurts to look at.
I stand in the middle of what's mine and I don't say anything to anybody because there isn't anybody.
Roman drops his head to crop at a tuft of grass.
I put my hand on his neck. That's the whole prayer.
When I ride back into the yard Opal's on the porch with a loaf of rosemary bread wrapped in a dishtowel.
She holds it out without a word. I take it.
Warm through the cloth. I press my palm flat to the top of it and stand a second on the step, then I go inside and cut it and eat two slices standing at the counter while she watches me and pretends she isn't watching me.
“Good?” she says finally.
“Best batch you've made.”
“You say that every time.”
“It's true every time.”
She makes a small pleased sound and turns her back so I won't see her face.
Day 65, I sit with Veda for an hour in her chambers going through the three ways the McKay sons could object to the map correction and the three recorded instruments that answer each one.
She gives me a copy of the courtesy notice she'll send them Monday.
I sign my affidavit. Nothing complicated. She walks me to the door.
“Straight home,” she says.
“Straight home.”
At ten past ten I walk out onto Holland Avenue with the letter in my inside jacket pocket. I turn left toward where I parked my truck. I look up because I always look up when I step out of a building.
I see him.
He's across the street.
The blue F-150 is parked at the curb in front of Cassia's bookstore. He's in the driver's seat with the window down. Both hands on the wheel like he's about to pull out. Dark blond hair a little too long. Fair skin wind-burned on the cheekbones. He's looking straight at me.
He doesn't get out.
I don't move.
I don't cross the street. I don't wave. Not one of the things I'd have done a week ago without thinking.
He doesn't do them either. He holds my look through the windshield with those ocean-blue eyes of his and doesn't do the thing he wants to, which is get out and cross to me — because he knows he doesn't have the right.
Not yet. Maybe not ever. That's up to me.
The street's quiet. There's a woman with a stroller half a block down. A delivery guy setting a box on the sidewalk outside the bakery. A wind that lifts the flap of my collar and drops it. My heart, which does what it does.
I stop in the middle of the street.
I look at him.
I count in my head the way I used to count when my father made me hold a fence post steady while he set the wire. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
Ten seconds is a long time to look at a man in a truck across a street in a small town.
I don't know what I'm telling him. I don't know what he's telling me. Maybe both of us are just saying, I see you. Maybe that's all we've got right now. Maybe that's a place to start and maybe it's a place to end, and I can't tell yet which one. Neither can he.
At the tenth second the wind pushes a strand of hair loose from my braid across my mouth.
I take a breath.
I start walking again.