Chapter 16
The decree came through on the twelfth of June and Alison Dunlap called her at nine in the morning to tell her.
Renee took it standing in a barn north of Livermore with a coffee going cold on a workbench and eleven hundred pounds of little bluestem stacked behind her.
"It's entered," Dunlap said. "You're divorced."
"Okay."
"Renee, I've done this twenty-two years and I want to say — that was the strangest file I've ever had. He conceded every single thing. He conceded things we didn't ask for. I sent one letter in five months and got back a letter agreeing with it." A pause. "Are you all right?"
"Yes," Renee said, and found that it was true, and that she had no idea what to do with her hands.
She hung up and stood in the barn.
Nine years and six months. It had taken forty minutes at a title company to buy two hundred acres and it had taken one phone call and no minutes at all to end a marriage, and outside the barn door there was a hundred and ten acres of stubble that wanted working before the fifteenth.
She went and worked it.
The place was better than she had let herself believe on the day she walked it.
That was the thing about June. Everything she had done since December had been done on eleven leased acres in nineteen degrees, out of four thousand dollars, in a trailer, with a county reading about her — and now she woke up in a farmhouse with bad wiring and good bones and walked out into two hundred acres with water, and it was hers, and there was nobody to tell and nobody who needed telling.
She had four weeks of it.
She learned the ground. She got the north gate rehung by a man from Wellington and thought about Fenner while she did it.
She ran the Phase One establishment counts on the burn scar twice a week, driving down at five in the morning and back at eight at night, and on the seventeenth of June she walked the third parcel with the county's natural resources manager and they both knelt down at the same time and neither of them said anything for about a minute.
There were seedlings. Two, three to the square foot on the bench, blue grama and sideoats coming up out of a burn scar in the first season, thin and green and absolutely unmistakable.
"Well," the woman said.
"Yeah."
"It'll take the eighteen months to be sure."
"It will," Renee agreed, and neither of them believed a word of it, and they knelt in the dirt on the side of a hill in Boulder County grinning like idiots.
Hugh Prentiss came by twice and told her three things she did not know each time. Maggie came up on the twenty-first and stayed two nights and pronounced the farmhouse "a fire hazard with a porch" and rewired the kitchen outlet herself.
She hired her first employee on the twenty-fourth of June. A twenty-three-year-old named Tori Delaney out of the CSU program who had emailed her in April, out of nowhere, having read the Phase One narrative for a class.
Ms. Tolliver — I understand you may not be hiring. I have read your technical narrative four times.
Renee had sat with that email for a long while when it came.
Here is the whole truth about those four weeks, and she made herself get it exactly right, because she had spent a winter learning what happens when you let somebody else describe your life.
She was happy.
Not brave. Not coping. Not building something out of the wreck.
She got up at five because she wanted to, and she was good at the work and getting better, and she had two hundred acres and a barn and a decreed water right and an employee, and she liked her own company, and she was thirty-eight years old and had built the entire thing herself out of a fifty-dollar reinstatement fee.
She would have been fine.
That was the thing she needed to be honest about, because everything after it depended on it.
Renee Tolliver could have lived the rest of her life on that ground and been genuinely, unspectacularly happy, and she knew it by the end of the second week with complete certainty, and it was the most valuable thing she owned.
He did not call. Not once, in six weeks.
She thought about him constantly.
She drove down on the eighth of July.
She did not call ahead. She got in the truck at six in the morning with two hours of chores already done and drove an hour and ten minutes and did not decide anything until Lyons, and by Lyons she had been deciding it for six weeks.
He was not on Mapleton.
She sat outside the rental for four minutes before she saw the lockbox on the door and the newspaper gone and understood.
So she drove up the ridge.
He was at the cellar.
The chimney was down — she had signed for that in April — and the foundation was a rectangle of knee-high stone with nothing in the middle of it, and the fence around the cellar opening was still up, orange plastic on steel posts, exactly as the contractor had left it.
Chase Ridgeway was sitting on the top step of the cellar stairs on the inside of the fence with his forearms on his knees.
His car was down at the second gate. He had walked up. It was five past eight in the morning on the eighth of July and he was in a work shirt she recognized from about eight years ago, and there was a thermos beside him on the step, and he was just sitting there.
She parked and got out and he stood up so fast he knocked the thermos over.
Neither of them said anything for a second.
"You're on the ridge," she said.
"I come up." He picked the thermos up. "Sorry. That sounds — I come up some mornings. It's your land, I know it's your land, I'll stop."
"How many mornings?"
He did not answer that.
"How many mornings, Chase."
"Most of them," he said. "Since about February."
Renee stood in the burned yard in the July sun and looked at her ex-husband, and there were about nine things she could have said, and what came out was:
"You look terrible."
"Yeah." He almost smiled. "You look — " He stopped himself, visibly, the way he had stopped himself all spring. "You look like the place is good."
"It's good."
"Good."
The wind came across the ridge, which it always did, and there was nothing left up there for it to move.
"I'm going to say a number of things," Renee said, "and I need you to not talk until I'm done, because I've had six weeks and I've got it in an order."
"Okay."
"Sit down. You're making me nervous."
He sat down on the stone foundation. She stayed standing, and then thought better of it and sat down eight feet from him on the same wall, because she was not going to do this looming over anybody.
"First," she said. "The decree came through on the twelfth. You know that."
"I know that."
"So there's nothing legal between us. Nothing.
There's no agreement, no filing, no lawyer, and there's no property, because you gave me all of it in January, which I have not forgiven you for and am not going to raise today.
" She looked out at the burn. "I want that established, because everything I say next is being said by a single woman with two hundred acres who does not need one thing from you.
I need you to actually hear that and not be gracious about it. "
"I hear it."
"Second. I was happy." She said it flatly.
"Four weeks. I want to tell you the truth about it because you're the only person I'd bother telling.
I got up at five because I wanted to. I hired somebody.
The stand came in on the bench, Chase — the first season, two or three to the square foot on ground everybody told me would give me cheatgrass — and I knelt down in the dirt and there was nobody there and it was still the best morning of my life. "
He was looking at the ground with his jaw set.
"I could do that for thirty years," Renee said. "And be happy. Not fine — happy. I need you to know I'm not here because it was cold up there or because it was hard."
"I know why you're here," Chase said. "I've known since you got out of the truck. I'm not going to be the one that says it."
"No," Renee agreed. "You're not."
"Third," she said. "The practice."
He did not move.
"You're not going to tell me. You've had eight months and you didn't tell me the night before the hearing when it was the only card in your hand, so you're not telling me on a July morning.
" She turned so she could see his face. "So I'm going to tell you, and you're going to sit there, and that's how we're doing this. "
He said nothing.
"You took out the room," Renee said. "Not the woman — the room.
The travel, the standing calls, the practice, the whole architecture that made eleven weeks possible without anybody noticing, including you.
Eleven jobs. Two utility contracts. The growth story.
And you handed this county eight years of proprietary work for free in perpetuity so that not one person on this burn was worse off for what you did to yourself. "
She watched his hands.
"And you did it in nine days without telling your board, and you would not tell your mother, and you would not tell Gil, and you would not tell me. Because you knew that the second it came out of your mouth it stopped being a thing you did and started being a thing you were saying."
Chase Ridgeway put his head down.
"How long have you had that," he said. His voice was in pieces.
"Since about the fourth of May."
"Renee—"
"I'm not done." She had to stop for a second herself. "Fourth. The boxes."
He went absolutely still.
"You had somebody stabilize eleven years of my mother's linens and you told them to keep the ruined ones ruined.
" Her eyes were streaming and her voice was doing nothing at all, which was a trick she had gotten very good at and which she never managed again after that morning.
"You read the clipping. The one from the business page, March of the year I closed.
You turned it over and you read what she wrote on the back of it and you put it back face up so I'd find it the way she left it, and you have never said one word about it, and you were never going to. "
"You weren't supposed to know it was me."