Chapter 7
Winslow
By the second week she had eleven hours of footage, a spreadsheet, and a sunburn in February off the water.
The work went like this. She got up at five. She drove somewhere with a thermos between her knees and the camera in the passenger footwell.
Nobody in four counties knew her last name.
That was the discovery of the second week and she turned it over most nights.
She had spent six years being the woman people were careful around.
Out here she was a middle-aged lady in a barn coat who wanted to film a pump house.
Twice she got told no. Once a man ran her off a property with real heat in it, and she drove away from that one grinning.
She came back at two or three, ate standing up, then sat at the kitchen table until her eyes gave out.
She found the water board meetings first. Four counties, three of them in rooms above a fire station, all of them attended by the same nine people.
The Bland County board met on a Tuesday at six in a room with a coffee urn and eleven folding chairs, nine of them full. She set up in the back. Nobody asked her to leave or asked who she was.
"Item four," the chair said. "Bid on the Cove Road main."
"There's one bid."
"There's one bid because there's one outfit within ninety miles that'll come out for a job this size, and we all know who it is, and I'd like it in the minutes that I said so."
"It's in the minutes."
"Good."
"Motion to accept."
Forty-one seconds, start to finish. It was the single most useful thing Winslow filmed in two weeks and she nearly missed it changing a battery.
She filmed a man named Tolley twice more at Buck Island, and got his wife the second time, who was better than he was and knew it.
Then she found the woman with the poly tank.
Four hundred gallons in the bed of a Ram, every Tuesday, eleven months running, from a fill station at a volunteer fire department to a house with a well gone bad. The county line ran forty feet the wrong side of her mailbox and put her outside a grant.
"Forty feet," Winslow said.
"Forty-one. A man came out with a wheel, measured it, wrote it down, and shook my hand." The woman had the hose in the tank and her boot up on the tire. "He was nice about it. That's not sarcasm. He was a nice man doing his job."
"Have you appealed it?"
"Twice. There's a form."
"And?"
"There's another form." She checked the tank and shifted the hose two inches. "Nobody's coming. That's not a complaint. It's just a fact you build a life around."
"Can I ask you a hard one?"
"You can ask."
"How long can you do this?"
The pump ran. Water came up in the tank and the truck settled on its springs.
"Till I can't," the woman said. "Then I'll sell it to somebody who doesn't know about the forty feet, and I'll feel poorly about that for the rest of my life, and I'll do it anyway."
Winslow drove back with that in her chest and sat in the gravel with the engine off for ten minutes before she could go inside.
One afternoon she drove up to a spring house in Dickenson County where an old man kept a jar of 1974 water on a shelf, sealed with wax, the color of weak tea.
"That's what came out the day they condemned it," he said. "I keep it for the ones who tell me it wasn't that bad."
"Can I put the camera on it?"
"You can put the camera on it. You can take it with you if you'll bring it back."
She held on the jar for two minutes with the light coming through the door behind it, and she knew while she was doing it that the shot would open the episode.
One night she found a woman in Grayson County who had kept every water bill since 1998 in a shoebox, in order, and would not let Winslow film the box until she'd gone and put on a good blouse.
"You don't have to change."
"I'm not going to be on a television in a housecoat."
"It's not television. It might be nothing."
"Then I'll have worn a good blouse for nothing," the woman said, "which has happened to me before."
The house filled up with her. Cards on the table in rows, hard drives, the good headphones, three coffee cups she kept meaning to deal with.
She stopped making the bed. She went whole days without seeing another face and did not once feel lonely, which was information she'd have preferred not to have.
Tessa called from the family office on a Thursday.
"Mrs. Fairbanks, I've got the March calendar and I'm holding two seats on the Charlottesville thing, and I wanted to confirm before I release one."
"Release it."
A pause exactly one second long.
"Both of them?"
"One of them. His."
"I'm sorry?"
"Release his," Winslow said. "I'm going to the Charlottesville thing. It's my program. Put me down alone and don't make it a topic."
"Of course. Should I flag that to Dara?"
"Tessa, I'm asking you not to flag it to anybody."
"Yes, ma'am."
She hung up and stood in a kitchen with the phone in her hand. She was shaking slightly. It was over the seating on a fundraiser bus.
Callum called on Wednesdays. She let it ring twice and picked up on three. They were both very polite. It took nine minutes, and afterward she'd stand at the sink with her hand over her mouth.
He sent the schedule every Sunday. She'd never asked him to. He did it anyway, the whole week of it, where he'd be and what room, and she read every one of them all the way to the bottom.
The third Sunday there was a line at the end that wasn't schedule.
The gutter's fixed. Nothing else. She read it eleven times and did not answer it.
On Wednesday she almost brought it up and didn't. On Thursday she caught herself checking the phone at ten in the morning for a schedule that never came before Sunday, and she put it face down on the counter and went out to the truck.
***
Gideon came down on a Friday and got lost twice and arrived cursing the mountain.
"There's no road," he said, out of the car. "There's a suggestion of a road. A road-adjacent rumor."
"You found it."
"I found it in ninety extra minutes." He had a canvas bag over his shoulder and a box of pastries from a place in Charlottesville that had not been on his way. "Feed me and show me the thing."
She fed him. She showed him the thing.
He ate two plates of a terrible pasta. He told her about a man at Kestrel who had taken up fencing at fifty-six and would not stop talking about it. Then his mother's hip. Then a restaurant in Fishtown that had gotten a review and gone downhill inside a month.
"You're stalling," Winslow said.
"I'm eating."
"You're stalling. You're afraid it's bad and you'll have to be nice to me."
"Winslow, I have never once been nice to you." He put his fork down. "Put it on."
He watched forty minutes of assembly with his elbows on her kitchen table and his chin on his fists and did not say one word, which was the only review she'd ever trusted from him. At the woman with the poly tank he sat back and pushed his hands into his hair and left them there.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Winslow, don't do that."
"Do what."
"The thing where you make me say it twice." He turned around in the chair. "It's the best work you've ever done and you know it's the best work you've ever done, and you've done it in fifteen days in a house with no heat."
"There's heat."
"There's a box."
She laughed. It got away from her, and she had to put a hand on the counter for a second, and when it stopped she was closer to crying than she liked.
Gideon got up and washed his hands at the sink, which he did not need to do, and gave her the thirty seconds.
"I'm going to say the professional thing," he said, drying them.
"Kestrel wants six half-hours. I've got two directors and I need a third.
I want it to be you, and I want to build episodes two and five around what's on that table.
It's a nine-month commitment. Philadelphia for the cut, field work out of here and West Virginia.
It's real money. It's your name on it, and the name is not negotiable.
I already fought that fight and won it."
"You fought it before you asked me."
"I fought it in December." He hung the towel up. "I'm not proud of that."
She sat down on the arm of the couch. Out the window the light had gone long and orange on the water and a fishing boat was making a slow line across it.
"Nine months," she said.
"Nine months."
"Gideon, I'm somebody's wife."
"I know exactly whose."
"That's not a small logistical—"
"I know." He came and sat on the ottoman across from her, forearms on his knees, close enough that she could see the gray coming in over his ear. "So let me do the other part badly, and then I'll go, and I'll never bring it up again unless you do."
"Don't."
"I'm going to." He said it kindly. "I want you on this show because you're the best documentarian I know and I'd take you if you were happily married and living on the moon.
That's true. It is not the only true thing.
I'm too old to sit at your kitchen table and pretend otherwise.
I would like you to know that if you ever came out the other side of whatever this is, I'd be standing right there. That's all. That's the whole speech."
The heater ticked. Down on the water the fishing boat cut its engine and the quiet came in off the lake.
He didn't touch her. He didn't lean in. He sat exactly where he was and let it be said. Then he picked up his bag and looked around the kitchen for his keys.
"On the counter," Winslow said.
"Right."
"Gideon."
"You don't have to say anything. That's the point of saying it that way."
He got his keys. At the door he stopped with his hand on the frame.
"Take a week," he said. "Take three. The show's not going anywhere until June."
She stood in the doorway and watched the car go up the gravel with the headlights swinging across the trees, and then she stood there a while after that.
Nine months. Her name on it. A man who had watched forty minutes of her footage without checking his phone once.
Ten years ago she'd have taken it out of his hand before he finished the sentence.
The money was the funny part. Nine months of directing for Kestrel came to less than the family had spent on the March fundraiser.
She'd run that number in her head standing in a doorway, and it had made her want to sit down on the step.
Every dollar of it would have been the first money she'd earned since 2016.
She had never once been able to explain that to anybody in that family without sounding ungrateful, so she had stopped trying in about year four.
She went inside and stood at the table with the cards laid out in rows and could not make herself pick a single one up.