CHAPTER 3 #2
His mouth did something small. It was not a smile. But it was in the neighborhood of one, and it left as fast as it had come. He set his hat back on his head with the same considered motion he had leaned on the tailgate with.
“Three options,” he said. “Buy you out at your price. Two point four million, my number today, in your account by Monday if you say yes. Or I let the county court sort out whose grass this is, and I lose a summer and a lawyer and you lose nothing but time. Or —” and here he tipped his hat brim two degrees toward me, and I understood in that half-inch of felt that this was the option he had come here to say, “— you marry me Friday. Twelve months. My lawyer places both tracts under one jointly controlled ranch operating agreement and prepares deeds into a company we own equally; nothing transfers unless we both sign. At twelve months, we can unwind it jointly. Public marriage. Real household. No physical obligation. Hollister witnesses the agreement.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
I closed it.
“You don't have to answer this morning,” Luke said. “You should not answer this morning. Take the day. I'll come to the main house at eight.”
“Sheriff,” I said.
“Yes ma'am.”
“He can offer this.”
“He can offer marriage. You can refuse it,” Sheriff Hollister said. “The land stays separate unless you both sign the deeds and operating papers. The unusual part is the acreage and the speed, not your right to say no.”
“Speed,” I said.
“There's a reason for the speed,” Luke said.
Then he walked away from the tailgate around the back bumper of my Bronco.
I thought he was going to open the driver door for me. I was already annoyed I was going to have to explain that I opened my own doors.
He did not open the door.
He dropped flat on his belly at the rear wheel well.
(What.)
He came up with something in his palm.
It was smaller than a poker chip. Matte black.
Unmarked. A small magnetic disc that had been stuck to the underside of the wheel arch of a rental Bronco I had picked up in the Missoula airport lot on Sunday afternoon.
He held it between his thumb and forefinger like a coin he was showing to a child.
“This was under your wheel well,” he said. “Not mine. Not the sheriff's.”
Sheriff Hollister went still the way a man goes still when a day he thought was one kind of day turns into another.
He crossed to Luke in three strides, took the disc, and stepped back to his cruiser.
He opened his glove box, drew out a paper evidence bag, dropped the disc in, folded the flap.
Then he stayed standing at his open door for a moment with his other hand on the roof of the cruiser, choosing what to say aloud.
“State contact tonight,” he said, quietly. “I'll run the frequency.”
Luke looked at me.
I looked at Luke.
(He has just told me somebody knows the Bronco. Which means somebody knows me. Which means the map I drew this morning was the wrong map.)
“Eight o'clock,” Luke said. “The main house.”
I nodded. My jaw would not do anything else.
He got in his truck. He did not slam the door. He drove off down the dust-cut toward his own gate at a speed that did not raise dust behind him.
I made it back to the main house a little after two, and I did not eat and I did not call my mother and I did not sit in the great room. I walked the porch, west end to east end and back. Slowly, because speed put the whole day between my teeth.
At four Marta found me on the top step.
She did not sit. She held out a small yellow-lined envelope, folded three times so the creases were as sharp as new paper.
My name was on the front. Not typed. Written.
Block-capital letters in a hand I would have recognized in a room of a hundred hands because it was the hand at the top of every birthday card I had opened at ages six through twenty and never after: CELIA ORTEGA.
“Your grandfather asked me to hold this for you four years ago,” Marta said. She did not sound sad. “He said, if she ever drives up. You drove up.”
I took the envelope. My hands were steady, and the steadiness itself was the loudest thing on the porch, louder than my pulse. I opened the flap standing. I unfolded the single page. I read it once through, and stopped at the last line, and read the whole thing again.
Girl, if you're reading this, you drove up. Don't sell to the neighbor's men. Sell to the neighbor and only the neighbor. He's the honest one, and the honest ones out here are worth staying near.
“Grandpa”
Yellow legal. Blue ballpoint. Handwriting slanted forward the way a person's writing slants when he has said a thing he does not intend to unsay. He had not signed Warren. He had signed Grandpa, once, at age eighty-one, to a granddaughter he had spoken to twice in her life.
I folded it. I put it in my back right pocket next to the estate lawyer's letter. I sat down on the top step of the porch.
No tears came. My eyes hurt for a second and then decided against it.
My thumb started tapping a small pattern against the heel of my opposite palm—a metronome I had brought from Denver without meaning to, a thing I did when I was arguing with myself and did not want the room to know I was arguing. It went for a while.
It did not stop until Marta came back out at five to say the sheriff was on his way and Luke would be at the house at eight and dinner at eight-thirty and did I want to change my shirt.
I said yes. I said thank you. I said I would be down.
Marta had laid the dining room table for four.
Two candles she did not light because it was still light out.
A pitcher of water, a small dish of butter, a loaf of the whole-grain bread I had watched her braid the day before.
Two bowls of beef-and-barley in the center on a trivet.
No wine. Nobody had asked her to lay it for four and nobody was going to ask her why.
Sheriff Hollister came in through the mudroom at eight straight up.
Luke came a minute after him, silent on the boards, hat in hand, hair damp at the temples from where he had rinsed under a pump at the cabin.
He set his hat on the sideboard. He took the chair at the foot of the table without being told which chair to take.
I sat at the head because Marta had already put my water glass there.
We ate.
The conversation was hay and the drought and one story the sheriff told about my grandfather that involved a heifer, a broken gate, and a Sunday sermon my grandfather had walked out of at the fifteen-minute mark to go get the heifer, and I laughed once at the punchline.
Nobody at the table pushed on the day. Nobody said tracker or marriage or Friday.
They were letting me sit inside my own decision the way a good room lets a person sit inside her own decision.
Marta cleared the plates. She poured coffee into four cups. She left the pot on a folded towel on the sideboard.
I put my coffee down without drinking it.
“Wednesday,” I said.
Three heads came up. Marta's hands paused on the sideboard.
“Not Friday. Sheriff, can we have the license slot Wednesday morning.”
Sheriff Hollister set his cup down. He looked at me with the still consideration of thirty years on the job; a woman making up her mind did not startle him. “I can,” he said. “The clerk owes me a favor. I can have you at the window by eleven.”
“Eleven is fine.”
Across the table Luke's shoulders dropped a quarter-inch. It was the smallest thing I have seen a large man do on purpose. He set a load down. He did not comment. Neither did I.
“You're sure,” Luke said, once. Not to press. To record.
“I'm sure.”
I stood.
“I need to sleep. Nobody follow me upstairs.”
Nobody did.
On the second-floor landing I stopped with my hand on the newel post. The wood was cool under my palm and shaped by a hundred years of other hands stopping at the top of the stair.
The two letters made a flat weight in my back pocket, both of them, paper against denim, and I thought the sentence I would not speak aloud for two months yet, up on the ridge above the aspens where the wind would move silver on the tops of the leaves and a man would kneel: the honest one.
I went to bed to be married in the morning to a man whose scar on his jaw I could already draw from memory.