Chapter 8 #2
It was fifteen degrees and the heat was off and she stood in the dark in her own waiting room among the beige chairs with her breath going up.
The suite was at the back. She went in there and put her right hand flat on the table she had chosen out of a catalog at twenty-nine — a used table even then, from a practice in Hutchinson that closed — and stood there for a while with her hand on the cold steel.
She was not saying goodbye to it. She wanted to be clear with herself about that, and she was, standing there: this was not a woman having a moment with a building.
This was a woman taking inventory. The autoclave was original and shot.
The light was original and good. The tile in the hall had been laid by a man named Ollie for four hundred dollars and a heifer, because Kristin had learned how to pay people from her father.
I built this once, she thought. At twenty-nine. With no money and a bad loan.
I'm thirty-six.
She locked the door behind her and put the key through the slot, and stood in the lot in the cold looking at the gray sign for about a minute.
Then she went home. She did not cry that night either. That came Thursday, over Brynn, over chairs.
Great Lakes gutted the surgical suite in March and made it a boarding room.
She heard about that later. It did not matter by then. It mattered enormously.
Brynn quit them the same week and came to work for Kristin for nothing, which is to say for what Kristin could pay her, which in December was about a third of what she was worth.
They had one fight about it, in the two rooms over the bakery, standing up.
"You can't afford me."
"I'll afford you."
"With what? You've got a truck and a phone."
"I've got twenty-nine farms and a phone," Kristin said, "and I have got exactly the amount of money I had in October, which is to say all of it, because I did not spend it on a building."
Brynn started to say something and then sat down on the one chair instead and put her hands over her face.
"I wanted those chairs," she said.
"I know."
"I wanted the beige chairs out and the good ones back in and I have wanted that for five years."
"I know you did."
"I'm not crying."
"You're absolutely crying."
"Well," Brynn said, "so are you, so."
And Kristin put her hand up to her own face and found that this was true, for the first time since a mudroom floor in February, and it was not about a man at all. It was about a building.
She shut the door on the tenth of December.
She did it in one phone call and it took ninety seconds. Lena listened and did not argue and when Kristin was done she said, "Say it once more so I can write it down exactly."
"No contact. Not through you either." Kristin was at the window.
"Anything about the claim goes to his company's counsel and never to him.
He does not get a channel. Not a letter, not a message, not you, not Brynn, not the feed store.
If he comes to a farm I'm at, I leave. If he parks at the wide spot, I'll call the county about it. "
"You won't."
"I might."
"Kristin." Lena's voice went careful. "Can I say one lawyer thing and one not-lawyer thing?"
"One each."
"The lawyer thing is that this is fine and I'll paper it today." A breath. "The not-lawyer thing is that in eight months, that is the first time you have sounded frightened."
Kristin watched the road.
"I let him near the door," she said.
"He bought you a building."
"He bought me a building," Kristin agreed, "and I let him near the door, and I laughed at a joke about a parrot, and I stood in a kitchen with my hand on his chest like a fool.
And I did all of that in three days in November, and by the first week of December he had done the exact thing he has always done, and if I had not been standing right there in that yard with a bucket I would have found out about it from a sign company. "
"That's not quite fair to him."
"I know it's not," Kristin said. "It's not about fair. It's about what he is. He didn't do it to hurt me. That's the whole point, Lena. He would do it again on Tuesday out of love, and he would be shocked again, and I would be standing in a yard again."
She hung up.
Then she went and got the gray shirt off the back of the bathroom door, and folded it, and put it in the bottom of the duffel with the tags still on it, because she was her mother's daughter too and you do not throw away sixty-eight dollars.
She sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and the dog's head on her leg.
Here is what she made herself say, out loud, into two rooms, at half past nine at night on the tenth of December, because she had learned that summer that a thing you say out loud is harder to argue with later:
"I don't get it back."
Tilly's tail moved once.
"The building's gone. It's gone for good, it's going to have a paw print on it, and in five years there'll be a girl working in there who doesn't know anybody ever laid that tile for a heifer.
" She scratched the dog's ear with the two fingers that worked.
"And I still have twenty-nine farms. And a truck. And you."
The furnace came on under the floor.
"And I am going to build something anyway," Kristin said, "and this time nobody is going to be able to buy it, because it isn't going to be a building. It's going to be me."
She sat there a while longer with the dog.
Outside, on the lake road, it started to snow — the first real one, the kind that means it.