Chapter 10
January was twenty below for nine days and then it got cold.
Kristin worked the whole of it. There is no weather in which a cow does not calve, and there is a particular kind of January morning in that county — clear, still, twenty-eight below with the sun coming up pink over a field of blowing snow like the whole world is a lie — that she would not have traded for anything on earth.
Her hands were the problem. The left one seized in the cold in a new way and stayed seized, and she took to keeping a chemical warmer inside the cuff and driving with her fist jammed in her armpit between farms, and she said nothing about any of it to anybody.
She had the letters in a shoebox under the passenger seat. She had read them four times and then stopped, deliberately, and put them under the seat, and left them there.
Blake had gone quiet.
Not the December quiet, which had been a wall with a man on the other side of it. This was different. She could feel the difference and could not have explained it, and the way she found out she was right was that the truck stopped coming to the wide spot.
Three Sundays. Four. Nothing at the feed store. Nothing at the county. Nan Petree had nothing, which for Nan Petree was a kind of illness.
Kristin told herself she was relieved. She told herself that in the truck, out loud, twice, which even at the time she recognized as a bad sign.
The other thing that happened in January was that she started looking at ground.
It began as a way of not thinking about the building on the lake road.
She would finish at four in the dark and instead of going home she would drive, and after about a week she noticed she was driving the same nine-mile square over and over — the county road west out of Mound, the gravel down to the river, back up through Minnetrista — and that she was looking at yards.
Not houses. Yards. Turnarounds a stock trailer could get out of. Frontage. A shed with power.
She said it to nobody. She wrote it in the back of the call book like a shopping list: pole shed. 3 phase or willing. 5+ ac. drainage. no HOA, no lake people.
She looked at four places in January and every one of them was wrong, and she went home every time in a better mood than she had gone out in, and did not examine that at all.
Adrienne Ellison came to the barn on the twenty-second of January.
Kristin was at Prewitt's — the big pole shed out on the Delano road where they ran the winter herd checks, a building with no heat and a dirt floor and eight hundred watts of sodium light hanging off a chain — and she was elbow-deep and had been for two hours, and there was a Lincoln idling in the yard that had absolutely no business being in that yard.
"You know that car?" said the kid Prewitt had hired in November.
"I do."
"Should I—"
"No."
Kristin finished the animal in the chute. Then she stripped the sleeve off and dropped it in the bucket and washed her arms to the elbow in water that was three degrees off freezing, and put her coat on, and went out.
Adrienne got out of the car when she saw her coming.
She was wearing a coat that cost more than the pole shed.
It was cream-colored and she was standing in a yard full of frozen manure in it, in town shoes, at four in the afternoon on the twenty-second of January, and Kristin understood before either of them said a word that something had come off its hinges.
"Adrienne."
"I want ten minutes."
"I've got a chute full of cattle."
"I know what you have," said Adrienne Ellison, "and I have driven forty minutes and I am standing in it. Ten minutes."
They stood in the doorway of the shed out of the wind. Adrienne would not go in and Kristin would not come out, so they met at the line, which Kristin thought later was about right for the two of them.
"Do you know what my son has done."
"No."
"You genuinely don't."
"Adrienne, I haven't spoken to your son since the third of December." Kristin put her hands in her pockets. "Say it or don't."
So Adrienne said it, standing in a doorway, in a voice Kristin had never heard from her — not the sun-room voice, not the coat-holding voice. A flat, fast, furious voice with all the finish sanded off it.
"On the sixth of January he put a staffing floor on every building in the senior-care arm.
Three dozen facilities, four states. Two aides minimum on every floor overnight regardless of census, and a third on any floor with more than twenty-two beds, and it is effective immediately, which in that business means he is now paying for eight hundred people who did not exist in December. "
Kristin did not move.
"The divestiture is dead. Not paused — dead, formally, in writing, with a note in it that the arm will not be marketed while he holds it.
" Adrienne's breath went up in the cold.
"The write-down goes on this year. He took it against his own holding rather than the operating company so it lands on him personally and not on the family, which he did not have to do, and which he did without telling anyone, and it is a number I am not going to say out loud in a farmyard. "
"Why are you telling me."
"I'm not finished."
Kristin waited.
"On the eighth of January he sent a letter to every professional this family employs.
" Adrienne's mouth was a line. "Our attorneys.
Our accountants. The public relations people.
The security firm. Rosemary. Me. It is one page.
It says that effective immediately no person is to screen, filter, prioritize, hold, or decline any communication addressed to him for any reason, that anything sent to him is to reach him unopened, and that any person who exercises judgment about what he sees will be terminated. "
Somewhere behind them in the shed the kid dropped a bucket.
"And," Adrienne said, "there is a paragraph at the end of it about me."
"What does it say?"
"It says that for the avoidance of doubt this includes his mother."
Kristin stood in the doorway of a cattle shed and did the only thing she was capable of doing, which was to keep her face still.
"He has burned the way this family has operated for four generations," Adrienne said.
"For nothing. For a gesture. Ted Cobb is gone.
Two of the cousins have stopped taking his calls.
The Sorenson thing will not happen now and that was six years of work, and I have had four phone calls in a week from men who were at his father's funeral, and every one of them asked me the same question, which is: what is wrong with Blake. "
"What did you tell them?"
"I told them nothing is wrong with Blake." Adrienne looked out at the field. "Which is the first lie I have told about my son in a decade that I did not enjoy telling."
There was a silence with a wind in it.
"Why are you here, Adrienne?"
And the old woman turned and looked at her, and there it was — the thing that had come off its hinges — and it was not fury at all underneath. It was the other thing.
"Because he won't tell you," she said. "And somebody is going to, and it may as well be somebody who is angry about it."
Kristin looked at her for a while.
"Adrienne. Did you ask him to undo any of it?"
"Of course I did."
"What did he say?"
Adrienne Ellison stood in the doorway of a cattle shed in a cream coat and considered, Kristin thought, whether to give her the polite version.
"He said, no." A pause. "That's the entire answer. I made an argument that took me nine minutes and I have made that argument to men in that family for forty years and it has never once failed, and he listened to all of it, and he said no, and then he asked me whether I wanted to stay for dinner."
"Did you?"
"I did not."
"Why not?"
"Because I did not know who I was having dinner with," said Adrienne.
And she said it in the same flat voice, but she said it looking out at a frozen field, and Kristin understood that she was watching a seventy-year-old woman be frightened in public for the first time in her life.
Rosemary Kilbride was in the car.
Kristin had not seen her through the glass. She saw her when she walked Adrienne back across the yard, and Rosemary got out on the passenger side and stood with the door open and her hand on the roof, in a good wool coat, sixty-four years old, in a farmyard.
"Mrs. Ellison," she said.
"Rosemary."
"You'll want to know that it's true." Rosemary's face did not do anything at all. "The letter came to me on the eighth. Mine was hand-delivered and it had a note on it."
"What did the note say?"
Rosemary looked at Adrienne across the roof of the car, and Adrienne looked back, and something passed between two women who had been in the same house for thirty-one years.
"It said, I'm sorry it took me until now to work out what you've been carrying."
Kristin's hand closed in her pocket. The right one.
"That's all," Rosemary said, and got back in the car.
She finished the herd. Forty-some head and she did every one of them right and did not think about anything else the entire time, which is the great mercy of the work and the reason she had chosen it.
Prewitt came out at six with two cups of coffee and handed her one and stood beside her looking at the chute.
"That the mother-in-law?"
"That was her."
"Huh," he said.
They drank the coffee. The sodium light buzzed on its chain.
"My wife's cousin's girl works up at one of them places in Buffalo," Prewitt said, to the chute.
"Not that outfit. Different one." He drank.
"She says they put two on nights everywhere over to the east side in January.
Middle of the night, out of nowhere, and nobody could get a straight answer about who was paying for it. "
Kristin looked at her coffee.
"That'd be the same outfit," she said.
"Ya," said Dale Prewitt. "Figured."
And that was the whole of his commentary on the subject, then and ever, and Kristin drove home thinking that if she could have chosen one person on earth to tell her a thing was true, it would have been a sixty-four-year-old man with a bad hip who had no idea he was doing it.