Chapter 16
The sign went up the following April, and it says HOVDE LARGE ANIMAL in white on green, and underneath it, smaller, K. HOVDE DVM.
That is the whole sign. There is no second name on it.
Blake asked her about that once, in the fall, while they were arguing about whether a shelter belt needed thinning. Not to be included — the opposite.
"I want it in writing that it's yours," he said. "The building, the ground, the business, all of it. In a document, filed, with my name nowhere on it. I've talked to a lawyer in Minneapolis and he says—"
"Blake."
"—he says there's a way to do it so that even if I—"
"Blake." Kristin put the loppers down. "You're doing it again."
He stopped.
He stood in a windbreak with a saw in his hand and she watched him hear it, and it took about four seconds, and then he laughed at himself, which he could do now.
"I'm arranging something for you."
"You're arranging something for me."
"Without asking."
"Without asking."
"Okay," Blake said. "Kristin, may I please put in writing that your practice is yours, because I would sleep better, and because I would like there to be a piece of paper somewhere that says so in case anybody ever wonders."
"Yes," she said. "Ask me things and you can have anything you want. It's remarkable."
So there is a document in a drawer in the office in the northwest corner, and it says that Hovde Large Animal belongs to Kristin Hovde and to nobody else, and she has never once read past the first page of it.
Here is what a year looks like.
The headgate went in that July and the hydrant line the September after.
The autoclave came used from a practice closing in Litchfield and it works.
There are two stalls at the far end, a pharmacy on the north wall out of the sun, and a desk in the northwest corner that Brynn runs like a small hostile country.
They have four hundred and six client animals on the books and a waiting list, which nobody in that county has ever heard of for a large-animal practice.
Dale Prewitt retired in March and did not pretend it was a surprise; Kristin took his cattle work and two of his farms would not go anywhere else.
Nick Pittman covers her weekends and she covers his, and once a month the three of them — Nick, Kristin and Brynn — sit in the office and eat something terrible from the gas station and argue about scheduling, and it is one of the better hours of Kristin's month.
The brown house is less brown. They did the floors themselves over two winters, badly, and there is a place in the hall where the boards do not meet and Kristin will not let anybody fix it.
Tilly died in November, at fifteen, on the kitchen floor with both of them on the floor with her, and Kristin gave her the injection herself because she was not going to hand that to anybody, and Blake held the old dog's head and talked to her the whole way down.
They buried her at the end of the spruce line.
It is the worst afternoon of that year and Kristin would not give it away.
There is a new one now, eight months old, out of a litter at the Sundstrom place, and she is a disaster and her name is Junior for reasons nobody can reconstruct.
The marriage.
Kristin can tell you exactly what is different and it is nothing anybody would put in a book.
He answers his own phone. That is the first thing and it is not a small thing.
There is no chief of staff and there is not going to be one — the company runs on four vice presidents who report to each other and to him, and it is less efficient than it was, and he is fine with that.
Anything sent to Blake Ellison reaches Blake Ellison.
He reads his own mail at the kitchen table and it takes him an hour a day and he has never once complained about it in her hearing.
He is worth a great deal less than he was.
The write-down landed, and then landed again, and the senior-care arm will not make money for six years and then will make a little.
He told her the number in January, sitting on the edge of the bed with his boots off, unprompted, without her asking, and she said, "Okay," and that was the entire conversation.
She says things now.
That is the other half and Kristin gives herself the credit for it, because nobody handed it to her.
Eleven years she had been the woman who did not make a fuss, and she had understood in a mudroom that being restful is not the same as being loved, and she has been practicing ever since.
When something is wrong she says it inside a day.
Out loud, in plain words, at the time, and it is still not easy at thirty-eight and it may never be.
They had a bad stretch in February. It was about nothing — a weekend in Chicago he arranged and she did not want and he had not asked about — and they had a real fight in a kitchen at ten at night, two people saying true things too fast, and she said the word again and watched it land on him like a chair.
And then he said, "You're right. I did that again. I'm sorry."
And she said, "Okay."
And the next morning it was over. That was the discovery of the whole year, and it is the thing Kristin would tell anybody who asked her: it does not go away, and it takes about a day now instead of eleven years.
The claim settled in September, quietly, for a number Lena was satisfied with. It never went to a courtroom. Kristin gave a great deal of it to a fund for families at Northaven and kept the rest and does not think about it much, which is the best thing you can say about money.
Blake found out about the culled files the way he found out about everything that year — slowly, and at his own expense.
It took a forensic records firm four months and a fee Kristin never asked the size of.
Jocelyn had gone back into her own intake summaries the week between the discovery and her termination and pulled every line with Anoka in it, one folder at a time, betting nobody would ever look closely enough to notice a gap in the numbering.
He told Kristin the day the report came back, plainly, the way he had promised he would, and neither of them ever said Jocelyn's name in connection with it again.
It changed nothing about the claim. It changed, for Kristin, exactly one thing: she stopped wondering.
Bruce Halliday is in Faribault. He wrote to her once, through the county, in a good steady hand, and she read it twice and put it in the shoebox with the other three, and she has not written back and does not expect to.
She is not angry at him. She has never once said his name out loud and she is not going to start now.
Jocelyn Harlow is in Duluth. Kristin knows that the way you know the weather in a place you used to live, and it does not cost her anything to know it, which is how she is sure she is finished.
Brynn asked her about that in the spring — they were doing the books, badly, at the end of a Friday — and it came out the way Brynn's questions always do, sideways and about eight months late.
"Do you ever think about her?"
"Who, Jocelyn?" Kristin did not look up from the column she was adding. "No."
"Kristin."
"I'm serious. Not for months." She put the pen down then, because it deserved a straight answer.
"I thought it'd be like a scar. I thought there'd be a place I couldn't press on for the rest of my life.
And there was, for about a year, and then one day in October I realized I hadn't thought about her since spring and I couldn't remember what her voice sounded like. "
"That easy?"
"It wasn't easy at all," Kristin said. "It cost me a building and a hand and a house that had been in a family a hundred and fourteen years. It just turned out that once you pay for a thing, you've paid for it."
Brynn thought about that.
"And him?" she said. "Do you ever — I'm not trying to start anything. Do you ever look at him and see it?"
And Kristin gave the true answer, because they were two women alone in an office at the end of a Friday and there is nobody on earth she lies to less.
"About four times a year," she said. "It comes up out of nowhere and it's as bad as it ever was, for about a day."
"What do you do?"
"I tell him."
Brynn blinked.
"You tell him."
"That same day. Out loud, in words." Kristin picked the pen back up.
"I say, it's on me today, and he says okay, and he doesn't defend himself and he doesn't fall apart and he doesn't try to fix it, and he stays in the room, and by the next morning it's gone.
" She wrote a figure in a column. "That's the whole marriage, Brynn.
That's it. That's the entire trick and it took two people thirteen years and a man with a knife to find it. "
The wedding was on the fourteenth of June, in the barn, at four in the afternoon.
It was forty people in work boots.
That is not a figure of speech. Kristin counted them from the stall gate before she came out and there were forty-one, and every one of them except the officiant and Adrienne Ellison was wearing boots they had done actual work in that morning, because it was a Saturday in June and half of that county was in first cut.
They had swept the shed for two days. Brynn had put up sixty feet of white lights along the rafters and would not discuss the cost of them.
There were hay bales, which is a cliché, and folding chairs, which is not, and a table of food that nine different women had brought without being asked and which no power on earth could have stopped.
Ray Sundstrom gave her away. She asked him in March, in his yard, and the old man had said "Ya" and then gone into the barn and not come out for twenty minutes.