Chapter 4 #2
He had not adjusted for her. Not once, in three hours.
He had also not failed to notice — she watched him clock the arm in the first ninety seconds, the way any vet clocks any body, one flat professional look and then filed.
He simply worked out inside two minutes what she could take and what she couldn't and then handed her things accordingly, without comment, without care, the way you'd work around a man who was left-handed.
She had not had that from a single human being since February.
Not from Janine, who was lovely. Not from Brynn, who was fifteen years in and still hovered.
Certainly not from her husband, who had asked her about the hand precisely twice, both times on the phone, both times in a tone that was already sorry.
At five in the morning they stood in the yard with the sky going gray and the coffee the owner had made them going cold in their hands.
"You're doing Prewitt's cattle work," Nick said.
"Some of it. Most of it, lately."
"He's going to retire in two years and pretend it was a surprise."
"I know."
"I've been short a partner since Vandenberg left," he said, looking out at the field. "Three years. I've been telling people two the whole time, which tells you something." He drank some cold coffee. "Not asking. Just saying it out loud in front of a witness."
"Noted."
"Okay." He rinsed his cup out on the gravel. "That's my whole speech."
Then he looked at her.
It was about a second and a half, which she knew because she had spent a lot of that summer measuring things.
There was nothing in it she could have complained about.
He was not sizing her up and he did not smile and he said absolutely nothing afterward — he put his cup in the truck and got in and said "Drive safe" and went.
But it was not a look at a colleague and both of them knew it, and it went through her like a stone dropped down a well, all the way down, and she stood in that yard in the gray light with her arms crossed and heard it hit.
She was thirty-six years old and a man had looked at her like a woman and it had been so long that her whole body sat up and asked what that was.
She did not do anything about it. She thought about it in the truck the whole way home and she did not do anything about it, then or later. But she filed it, exactly the way he had filed her arm, and it stayed filed.
She made the offer on the last Friday in August.
The building had been listed since March with a realtor in Wayzata who did not know who Kristin Ellison was, which she had confirmed by driving past twice and then calling from the truck and giving her name as Kristin Hovde and hearing absolutely nothing happen on the other end.
She used her own money. She said that out loud in Lena Straub's office, unprompted, and Lena looked at her over her glasses.
"Nobody asked."
"I know."
"Kristin. I have been doing this for twenty-two years. He is not going to be in this. He can't be in this — he doesn't know you're doing it, and if he finds out from anyone it isn't going to be me." Lena took her glasses off. "That said. Do you want me to structure it so he can't get in?"
Kristin thought about that for a second.
"No," she said. "There's nothing to structure. It's a building on a county road for less than the price of his mother's car. Nobody's fighting me for it."
She would think about that sentence quite a lot in December.
The offer went in Friday afternoon. Nine percent under ask, which was fair, because the roof was past due and the new owner had let the surgical suite go to storage and there was a hole in the drywall in exam two that had been there since the year Kristin sold it.
Brynn had walked it with her on Wednesday, on a lockbox code, on a lunch hour, both of them moving through those rooms without talking much.
The waiting room had different chairs. That was the thing that got her, stupidly — not the storage boxes stacked in her surgical suite, not the sign, not the ceiling tile in the hall with the water stain shaped like Wisconsin.
The chairs. She had picked the old ones out of a catalog at a kitchen table at twenty-nine and had been so pleased with herself, and they were gone, and there were beige ones.
"I want to say something," Brynn said, in the hallway.
"Say it."
"I've worked for that man for five years and he's not a bad guy, he's just tired." Brynn had her hands in her barn coat pockets. "And I have wanted this for four of those five years and I have never once said it, because you were married and it wasn't mine to want."
Kristin looked at the water stain.
"So I'm saying it now," Brynn said. "Buy it. And don't you dare do it for me."
"I'm not doing it for you."
"Good."
"I'd like you to run it."
"Obviously," Brynn said, and blew her nose, and was furious about that for the rest of the afternoon.
The realtor called back within the hour, sounding surprised, and said the seller wanted to think over the weekend.
Kristin hung up and stood in the middle of the two rooms above the shut bakery with the phone in her hand.
Then she went and did the six o'clock call, which was a downer cow at a place near Loretto, and she was there until nine-thirty and lost her, which happens, and she sat in the truck afterward and wrote it in the book she had started keeping in June because her father had kept one.
8/29 — Vosberg — cow, down 3 days, hypocalcemia + something else. n/g.
She looked at the three letters for a while.
Then she drove home, and got the dog down the stairs and back up, and stood at the window with the putty in her hand — twenty, rest, twenty — looking at the lake road with the lights of Mound going off one at a time.
And it came to her, standing there, that she had not thought about Blake Ellison since she woke up.
Not once. Not in the truck, not in Lena's office, not in the yard at Loretto with her arm in a cow that was going to die anyway, not at any point in eighteen hours.
She waited for that to feel like winning.
It didn't. It sat in her chest like a swallowed stone, cold and perfectly smooth, and she stood at that window a long time with a lump of putty in her ruined hand and understood, for the first time and with total clarity, that she was going to get all the way over him.
That she had already started.
That nobody was coming to stop it.