Chapter 6 #2
"He absolutely did." Kyle Whitcomb pulled his gloves on. "Well. That's a hell of a thing. Are you back or are you doing a job?"
And Renee stood in the mud in a coat that used to belong to Maggie's sister and said, "I'm back," and found out that it was true at the same moment he did.
He put his hand out and she shook it.
And driving away he leaned out the window and said, "It's good to meet you," in the ordinary way that men say that, without a single thing under it — not knowing who she was married to, not knowing about the ridge, not having read anything, having no idea at all that she was the woman from the county paper.
He had met a person named Renee Tolliver who knew seed.
She stood in the yard and watched the truck go down County Road 9, and she noticed that it had landed on her, and she noticed that she had noticed, and she did not do one thing about it except stand there.
Then she went and fed the dogs.
Maggie came Saturday and they worked.
That was all. There was no conversation about the marriage, and Renee understood afterward that Maggie had come out specifically to not have one.
They pulled the last of the north fabric.
They got the hoop house skinned, badly, twice, and the second time it took because Maggie went up the ladder and Renee stood on the bottom rail of the fence swearing at the wind.
They ran a string line for the propagation beds.
Maggie brought a chainsaw and took out the dead Russian olive at the corner that Renee's father had been meaning to take out since 1998.
They ate lunch sitting on the tailgate at one o'clock with their boots hanging.
"Your hands are wrecked," Maggie said.
"Yep."
"There's cream in my truck."
"I'm not putting cream on."
"I know you're not." Maggie chewed. "It's in the truck."
Around two the sun came out for about forty minutes, and it was that specific February sun that has no warmth in it at all but changes the color of everything, and the two of them stood in the middle of eleven acres of turned dirt and looked at it.
"You know what this ground is," Maggie said.
"Don't."
"I'm going to say it."
"Mag —"
"It's the only thing you ever built that nobody else's name went on," Maggie said. "That's all. That's the whole speech."
The county called on the thirteenth at eleven twenty in the morning.
Renee was under the hoop house with her arms full of ground fabric and she answered with her elbow and had to put the whole armload down in the mud.
It was the woman from the listening session, the one in the county fleece.
"Ms. Tolliver," she said, and Renee's stomach did something complicated at the name. "You've got Phase One."
Renee stood in a hoop house in the mud.
"You were high," the woman said. "You want to know how high?
Eleven percent over Loomis Reclamation and about fourteen over Bellamy Land and Water.
And I want to say out loud, because it'll come up and I'd rather it come from me: two people asked me whether awarding this to you was going to look like something. "
"I understand."
"I don't think you do, so let me finish.
I told them that I have three hundred pages of technical narrative from four bidders, and that yours is the only one that distinguishes ecological sites within a parcel, and that Loomis has proposed to put the same mix on the bench and the drainage, and that if I award this on price I will be standing in front of these same commissioners in two years explaining forty thousand dollars an acre of cheatgrass.
" A pause. "And then I told them that I have been doing this for twenty-six years and that if my judgment is for sale, it is not for sale that cheap. "
Renee did not trust her voice for a second.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't thank me. Make the stand." Papers moving.
"Preconstruction's the twenty-fourth. Bring your drilling sub.
And Ms. Tolliver — the establishment guarantee is real.
I will hold you to it, and I will enjoy holding you to it, because that is the first bid I've read in six years that was written by somebody who's actually knelt down on that ground. "
She hung up.
Renee stood in the hoop house.
Then she walked out into the middle of the acreage and stood there in the wind, and she put her hands on top of her head, and she said, out loud, "Oh my God," and she laughed, and it came out wrong and cracked in the middle, and she stopped.
She called Maggie and got voicemail and did not leave one.
She looked at her phone.
And there it was, the way it had been coming at her all winter from the side: the top name in her recent calls, from nine years of it, the one you did not have to scroll for.
She stood in the middle of nine hundred and forty acres' worth of the best thing that had happened to her in six years, with her thumb over her husband's name, and she wanted to call him so badly that her eyes stung.
He would have been so glad.
That was the thing she could not get around, and she stood out there working at it in the cold.
He would have been glad. Not managing, not fixing — she could hear exactly how it would go, she could hear him say say that again, say the part about the bench, she could hear him laugh at eleven percent over.
She put the phone in her coat.
She got in the truck and drove into Longmont and bought a steak and a bottle of wine, and she cooked the steak on a propane burner outside a trailer at nineteen degrees, and she ate it sitting on a bucket with the dogs, and it was one of the four or five best days of her life.
At nine o'clock she wrote it on the legal pad.
Feb 13 — Phase I. 940 ac. Awarded to Tolliver Native Seed.
She looked at that for a while.
Then, underneath it, in smaller writing, because she had promised herself in the cellar that she was going to stop lying to herself about what things cost:
Didn't think about him all day until 11:41.
Then wanted to call him so bad I had to sit down.
Both of those are true. Don't get to pick one.