Chapter 15
She took three weeks.
That was not indecision. She wants that on the record, because for the rest of her life people assumed those three weeks were a woman agonizing, and they were not. They were a woman doing the arithmetic properly for once, on paper, the way her father would have.
She wrote it in the back of the call book on the first Sunday in June, sitting at the table in the brown house with the carpet gone and the subfloor showing.
What I have.
Twenty-nine farms and four more waiting.
A shed with stocks in it and a headgate coming in July.
Brynn at the desk. A truck with two hundred and ten on it.
Nine acres and a bad house she was fixing herself, badly.
A dog with maybe a year. A profession she is better at now than she was with two working hands, which is a sentence nobody would believe and which is true.
A life. An entire, whole, sufficient life that she built between April and June with her own money and her own arms, and that she would be perfectly happy in until she was eighty.
She looked at that list for a long time.
Then she wrote, underneath it:
What I want.
And there was only one thing on that list, and she had known it since a mailbox at midnight on the last Thursday in May, and she sat in a half-finished kitchen and said, "Well, hell," out loud, to nobody.
Here is what the three weeks were actually for.
Nick Pittman asked her to dinner on the second Friday in June.
It was not a surprise and it was not clumsy and he did it exactly the way he did everything, which was in the middle of a job, without any weight on it — they had a mare with a bad laceration in a stall in Delano and he was holding the light and he said, "You ever get a night off?"
"Not really."
"That's what I figured." He moved the light. "If you did, I'd take you to dinner. There's the place in Waverly."
Kristin kept suturing. Right-handed, small bites, the left forearm braced across the mare's shoulder as a shelf, which is how she did everything now.
"Nick."
"You don't have to say anything about it.
I've been sitting on it ten months and I'd have gone on sitting, except somebody told me the house sold.
" He said it without any self-pity at all.
"Figured if I didn't say it before you worked out what you were doing, I'd have to spend the rest of my life being a man who never said it. "
She tied off. She cut the suture. She stood up and stripped her gloves and looked at a forty-four-year-old man holding a light in a barn at nine o'clock at night, who had handed her instruments for a year without ever once adjusting for the hand.
"I'm going to say no," Kristin said, "and I want to say why, because you've earned that."
"You don't have to—"
"You looked at me in August," she said, "in a yard at five in the morning, like I was a woman. And I want you to know that was the single best thing that happened to me last year, and I mean that against a fairly strong field, and I have thought about it about nine hundred times."
Nick Pittman looked at the floor of the barn and laughed a little.
"Well," he said. "That's a hell of a no."
"It's a real no."
"I know it is." He hung the light on the hook. "Is he any good?"
And Kristin stood in a barn aisle and gave the only honest answer she had.
"He is now," she said.
That was the arithmetic done.
Because that was the thing she had needed and could not have manufactured: a road.
A real one, with a real man on it who was kind and competent and who wanted her, in a county where she now had a practice and a building and a life, and she could have taken it.
It was right there. It would have been a good life and she would not have been lying to anybody.
She said no to it on a Friday in June with her hands still wet.
And driving home she understood that everything she did after that was a choice and not a shortage, and that she was going to be able to look at it that way for the next forty years, and that the difference between those two things is the whole of a marriage.
She went to him on the twenty-first.
It was a Sunday. She did not send a message and did not call and did not wait for a Thursday, and that was deliberate too: the Thursdays were the terms, and she was not going to do this inside a set of rules she had written to keep him at a distance.
He had taken a rental on the north side of Mound, a two-bedroom on a street of two-bedrooms, four blocks off the lake road. She had never been inside it. She had driven past it twice.
It was a quarter past eight and still light, the way it is in Minnesota in June, and there was a truck in the driveway with a load of two-by-fours in the back and a man sitting on his own front steps with a beer, in a T-shirt, doing absolutely nothing.
That was the thing that got her, from the road, before she even stopped.
Blake Ellison, sitting on a concrete step in front of a rented house on a street where anybody could walk up.
She parked. She got out.
He stood up when he saw her and went very still.
"It's Sunday," he said.
"I know what day it is."
She did not go in.
She stood on the walk at the bottom of the steps and made him stay where he was, which she had not planned, and which turned out to be exactly right, because what she had to say was a doorstep speech and she had been building it for three weeks.
"I'm going to talk for a while," Kristin said. "Don't help."
"Okay."
"Nick Pittman asked me to dinner on the twelfth."
Something went across Blake's face and he did not say one word.
"I said no. I want you to know that I said no before I came here and not after, and that I thought about it properly, because it would have been a good life and he's a good man and he never once looked at my arm like it was a tragedy.
" She kept her hands in her jacket pockets.
"So this isn't me running out of options.
I had an option. I've got a practice and a building and money and a dog and I'd have been fine, Blake, I want you to understand that I would have been genuinely fine, and if you ever once in the next forty years act like I came back because I needed to, I'll leave and I won't come back. "
"I understand."
"Say it back."
"You didn't need to," Blake said.
"Right." She took a breath. "Now the rest of it. These aren't terms. I did the terms in February and they were a chute and you stood in it and I'm done building chutes. This is just what's true, and you can say no to any of it, and if you do, that's the end and there won't be a fight."
"Go ahead."
"I'm a large-animal vet. That's what I do now.
I'm on call, I go out at four in the morning, I come home with my clothes ruined and I smell like a barn, and I am going to do that until my body won't. It is not a hobby and it is not a phase and it is not something you support me in.
It's my job and it's better than the one I had. "
"I know."
"The practice is mine. Not ours. Mine, in my name, forever, and if we're married for another forty years it will still be mine, and that is not about trust, it's about the fact that I sold one already and I know what happens.
" She looked at him. "And you don't get to put money into it.
Not a dollar. Not a loan, not a gift, not a favor with a contractor, not a thing you arrange quietly with somebody in Waconia.
If it grows, it grows out of what it makes. "
"Okay."
"And you live where I live," Kristin said. "Which is a house with somebody else's carpet in a landfill and a subfloor I'm still sanding. And you don't fix it. We fix it, or I fix it, or it stays bad."
"Okay."
"And the last one." Her voice did the thing it had been doing all year and she let it.
"You have to say things. Out loud. To me.
Before, and not after. That's the whole of it, Blake, that's the entire thing I want, and it's the only one I can't check up on.
You had a broker's letter in a drawer for four months.
If we do that again, if you sit on one more thing because you've decided it's not the moment — I'm gone, and I'll be sad about it for the rest of my life, and I'll still go. "
She stopped.
"That's it," she said. "That's everything."
Blake stood on the top step of a rented house with a beer in his hand and his eyes going.
"Can I say one thing?"
"Yes."
"I'd have taken worse," he said.
"I know you would. That's not the point."
"No," he said. "I know it isn't."
And then he said, "Kristin. Are you coming back?"
And she said, "Yes."
She said it standing on a public sidewalk in Mound at half past eight on the twenty-first of June, and afterward she could never remember going up the steps.
She remembered his hand. That was the first real thing: his right hand coming up and stopping about four inches from her face, hanging there, because after fourteen months he did not know if he was allowed.
Kristin took it and put it against her cheek herself.
"You can," she said.
He made a sound like a man going under.
He got the door open behind him without looking at it and they got inside and the door shut and then it was fourteen months coming down at once.
There was nothing careful about it and both of them had been waiting for it long enough that the first minute was almost violent — her hands in the front of his shirt, his mouth on hers, her back against the inside of the door hard enough to knock a picture off the wall in a rented hallway, and neither of them stopped for it.
She had thought about this. She was honest about that. She had thought about it in the truck in November and on the floor of two rooms in March and had put it away every single time, and here it was, and it turned out the putting-away had done nothing but store it.
He tasted like beer and like Blake, which is not a describable thing and which she had not had in her mouth in three years, and she made a sound against him that was almost an objection.
"Wait," she said, and did not let go of his shirt. "Wait a second."