Chapter 11
She got through the ninth of February by working.
That was the plan and it was a good plan and she had made it in advance, the way she made everything now: four farms, a full day, nothing in the schedule that could be moved and nothing in it that would leave her sitting down.
She took the first call at five in the morning and the last one at seven at night and in between she did not stop once.
It did not work.
It got her to about four in the afternoon, which was more than she expected. Then she was standing in a milk house near Watertown washing her arms, and the light through the door went a particular thin yellow that February light goes at four o'clock, and it came up over her like water over a boot.
A smell of slate. The sound of her own voice counting. A knee she had put down and could not get back up from, and the enormous, humiliating, animal surprise of it — the discovery, at thirty-five years old, that she was a bag of parts and that they could be opened.
She held onto the edge of the sink with the right hand.
It took maybe ninety seconds. She had learned by then that it always took about that long, and that there was nothing to do but stand still and let it go through, like a bad wave in a shallow lake.
Then she dried her arms and went out and did the last farm.
Brynn called at nine that night and did not mention the date, which was correct, and talked for twenty minutes about a supplier in Buffalo who had shorted them on gloves.
At the end of it she said, "You want company?"
"No."
"Okay."
"Brynn."
"Yeah."
"Thanks for not saying it."
"Wasn't going to say it," said Brynn, who had said it in nine other ways in twenty minutes, and they hung up.
The building she bought was four and a half miles west of Mound on a county road, and she signed for it on the eleventh of February.
Nine acres. A forty-by-eighty pole shed with three-phase power, put up in 1998 by a man who repaired combines and had died in it, which the realtor did not mention and Brynn found out in an afternoon.
A gravel turnaround a semi could get out of.
A well. A house — a bad one, small and brown and full of somebody's carpet — and a shelter belt of spruce along the north line that somebody had planted at exactly the right distance from the buildings, which told Kristin that whoever put up that shed had known what he was doing.
She paid for it with the money from the practice, all of it, and the last of the account her father left, and she signed her own name at a table in a title company in Waconia at ten in the morning with nobody there but Brynn and a closer named Deb.
She did not wear the gray shirt. She wore a flannel with a hole in the elbow, on purpose, and she has never been able to explain why to anybody.
Afterward they stood in the empty shed with their breath going up and looked at eight thousand square feet of concrete with a floor drain in the middle of it.
"Well," Brynn said.
"Yeah."
"It's a shed, Kristin."
"It's a shed with three-phase," Kristin said, "and a drain, and a turnaround, and it's mine, and nobody handed it to me."
Brynn put her arm around her and neither of them said anything for a while.
Then they walked it, the way you walk a thing you have just bought, saying what will go where.
Stocks at the east end, on the drain. A crush and a headgate.
Two stalls at the far end for anything that has to stay overnight and a hydrant she would have to run a line to before next winter.
Office in the northwest corner, and Brynn stood in that corner and turned around once and said "This is the desk," in a voice that did not permit argument.
The pharmacy would go on the north wall out of the sun. The autoclave — she was going to need an autoclave, a real one, and she said the number out loud and Brynn said a word.
"We can't do it all this year."
"No."
"So what's this year?"
"Stocks, a headgate, the office, and a sign," Kristin said.
"That's not a practice."
"It's the truck," Kristin said. "It's been the truck since June. That's what I keep trying to tell people. This isn't where the work happens — the work happens in somebody's barn at four in the morning. This is just where the work lives."
She looked down eighty feet of cold concrete.
"And I'm not going to be forty years old with nowhere to put it," she said.
She wrote to him on the fifteenth.
It took her four days and nine drafts, and the final one was six lines long, and she wrote it by hand on a page torn out of the call book because she wanted it to look like what it was.
Blake —
Your mother came out to Delano in January and told me what you did. Rosemary confirmed it. I decided for three weeks that it was a legal strategy and I was wrong, and I would rather say that to you than let you find out I said it to somebody else.
I am not coming back and this is not that. But I have decided I would rather see you occasionally than spend the rest of my life not knowing what you are.
Terms, and they are not negotiable:
One hour. Thursdays. Six o'clock, at my shed on County 110.
You come with nothing in your hands. No gifts, no papers, no lawyers, nothing about the claim, nothing about money.
You don't ask me for anything. It ends when I say it ends, and if I don't want you there on a given week I will tell you so and you will not ask why.
If you agree, be there on the nineteenth.
K.
She put it in the mail on the sixteenth, addressed to the house, unopened by anybody, because there was nobody left to open it.
He was there at six on the nineteenth.
She knew because she was there at five-thirty and his truck came up the road at ten of and sat at the end of the driveway until exactly six, which she watched from inside the shed with her arms crossed, and which she found so infuriating and so entirely correct that she had to turn around and look at the wall for a second.
He came in with nothing in his hands.
Not a coffee. Not a bag. Nothing. He had thought about that and got it right, and he stopped four feet inside the door on the concrete and stood there in a canvas coat with his hands loose at his sides.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
They looked at each other across eight thousand square feet of empty.
"You can sit," Kristin said. "There's feed sacks."
He sat on a feed sack.
She sat on the tailgate of the truck, which she had backed into the shed out of the wind, and she had a thermos and did not offer him any, and he did not look at it once.
For the first fifty minutes he said almost nothing.
She had expected — she was honest with herself about this afterward — she had expected him to talk.
She had braced for it all week. She had a whole set of doors ready to shut, one for each thing he might say: the apology door, the January door, the I've changed door, the building door. She had them all lined up and loaded.
He asked about the shed.
That was it. He asked how many acres and she told him, and he asked about the power and she told him, and he said "Ninety-eight?
" about the year and she said yes and he said "That's a good year for a shed," which is the sort of thing that is either meaningless or the truest thing a man has ever said, depending entirely on who he is.
And then he stopped, and sat on a feed sack with his forearms on his knees, and looked at the floor.
Ten minutes went by.
Kristin drank her coffee. Out past the open door the light went and the yard light came on with its little click and the spruce along the north line went black against the sky. Somewhere a long way off a plow was working the county road.
Fifteen minutes.
It was the strangest thing that had happened to her in a year.
She kept waiting for it to be unbearable and it kept not being.
She had spent eleven years in rooms with this man where one of them was always doing something — planning, hosting, arranging, going somewhere — and she could not remember, going back through all of it, a single hour of simply being in a building with him.
At twenty of seven he shifted on the feed sack and said:
"Can I ask you something?"
"Depends."
"What can it do?"
She turned her head.
He was looking at her left hand, which was around the thermos cup, which was how she held a cup now — the whole hand wrapped, not the fingers, because the fingers would not do it.
"What can it do," she said.
"Yeah." He did not look away and he did not soften it. "I've never asked and I've had ten months to ask. What can it do and what can't it, and what did the therapist actually say, and I mean the real answer and not the one you give at a table."
Kristin sat on a tailgate in a cold shed and felt something go straight through her like a spike.
Nobody had asked her that.
Not Brynn, who worked around it. Not Prewitt or Pittman or Ray Sundstrom, who did not need to ask and would not have dreamed of it. Not Lena, who had asked about "the injury" in an entirely different sense. Janine had asked what it could do, but Janine was paid to.
In ten months, out of every person who loved her, nobody had asked her what her hand could do.
"It won't close," she said.
"I know that part."
"No, you know it looks like it won't close.
" She put the cup down on the tailgate and held the hand up in the yard light.
"Ring and little finger. There's about a quarter of an inch of travel in the ring and none in the other one.
So there's no fist. There's no grip that needs a fourth point of contact, which is more things than you'd think — a clipper, a bucket handle, a rope with any weight on it, a scalpel if you're going to be honest about it. "
"So no surgery."
"No soft tissue. Probably no orthopedics, ever.
" She turned the hand over. "The forearm's the bigger problem, actually, and nobody ever asks about the forearm.
It aches from about noon on and it seizes in the cold, and this winter it started staying seized, and I've got a warmer in my cuff most days from November to March. "
Blake did not say I'm sorry. She noticed that.
"What can it do?" he said again.
And Kristin, before she could get in front of it, laughed.
"It's a wonderful flat surface," she said.
"What?"
"It's the best hand I've got for going into a cow.
" She was still holding it up. "You don't want a fist in there, you want a flat palm and a long reach and nothing that catches, and I've got the best one in the county.
Prewitt can't do a hard palpation anymore because of his shoulder.
I can do it all day." She let the hand drop.
"The thing that ended one career is the thing I'm best at in the other one.
I've never said that out loud to anybody. "
Blake sat on the feed sack and looked at her.
"That's the whole answer," she said. "That's more than I've told the therapist."
"Thank you," he said.
And that was all he said. He did not do anything with it. He did not tell her she was remarkable, which she would have thrown him out for, and he did not apologize, and he did not follow up with a second question to keep her going.
At seven o'clock exactly he stood up.
"That's the hour," he said.
"That's the hour."
"Okay." He put the feed sack back where he'd got it, which she noticed. "Same time next week?"
Kristin looked at him.
"Yes," she said.
He went out to his truck and drove down the county road, and she stood in the doorway of her own shed and watched the taillights go, and stayed there a while after they were gone.
There were three more Thursdays in February and March before anything changed, and she held every inch of them.
The second one she nearly cancelled and did not.
He sat on the same feed sack and she made him wait through forty minutes of her doing inventory out loud with a clipboard, which was petty and which she enjoyed enormously, and he wrote nothing down and offered nothing and at one point held the far end of a tape measure because she asked him to.
The third one she did cancel. She sent four words on the Wednesday — not this week.
K. — and he did not reply, did not ask, and did not drive out to check, and she found out later from nobody at all that he had spent that Thursday evening at the house, alone, because there was nowhere else he had any business being.
The fourth one he came in and said, "I have something I'm supposed to tell you and it's about the claim, so I'm not going to tell you," and sat down.
Kristin looked at him for a second.
"Is it bad?"
"It's not bad."
"Is it about the culled files?"
"Kristin," he said, "I gave you my word about the hour," and that was the end of it, and she had to go stand by the door for a minute and pretend to look at the weather.
Because here was the thing about the terms she had written on a page torn out of a call book: she had written them to keep him small. One hour, no hands, nothing brought. She had built them the way you build a chute, to hold something that could hurt you and let you work on it in safety.
And he had walked into the chute and stood in it without touching the sides.
There is no way to hold a man to a rule he is not straining against. Every Thursday he took exactly the hour and not one minute of it more, and every Thursday the hour got harder for her and not for him, and by the middle of March Kristin had begun to understand that the terms she had set were doing something she had not designed them to do.
They were not keeping him out.
They were keeping him in — one hour a week, in her building, on her ground, with nothing in his hands — and inside that hour there was nothing left for him to be except a man in a coat, sitting on a feed sack, answering when spoken to.
Which is to say: he had nothing to hide behind anymore, and neither did she, and one of them was going to break first and it was not going to be him.
Here is what she thought about, driving home in the dark, and it was not any of the things she expected:
I answered him.
He had asked her a question, and she had not managed it.
She had not given him the table version.
She had sat on a tailgate and told a man the truth about her hand for four straight minutes, including the part about the forearm and the part about being the best in the county, and she had not decided to do it — it had come out of her the way water comes out of a hydrant somebody primed.
She had built a wall in April with her own two hands and maintained it for ten months without one crack in it, and she had let him back through it herself, on paper, in writing, on terms she wrote.
And within fifty minutes he had asked her the only question anybody had ever needed to ask, and she had answered it.
You did that, she thought, going past the shut café and the Lutheran church. Nobody did that to you. You wrote the terms and you set the hour and you picked the ground and you answered him anyway.
She was not frightened yet. That came later, in March.
That night she was something worse, which was interested.