Chapter 17
Twenty-one months after the fire
The eighteen-month count came in on the ninth of June, and Renee Tolliver did not tell anybody for four hours because she wanted to walk all eleven parcels first.
She walked them with Tori Delaney, who was twenty-four now and ran the Livermore beds four days a week and had opinions, and with the county's natural resources manager, who was in the fleece again and had brought a frame and a clicker and a face like a woman determined not to be pleased in front of a contractor.
They counted the bench above Twenty-Six Road last.
Blue grama, sideoats, western wheatgrass where she had put it and not where the map said.
Little bluestem coming into its second year with that rust in it that you cannot get from anywhere else.
Two and a half live perennial stems to the square foot on ground that four bidders had said would give the county cheatgrass, and cheatgrass on maybe eleven percent of it, mostly along the two-tracks, which was where Renee had told them in February it would be.
The woman from the county knelt down with the frame and counted, and stood up, and took her glasses off.
"Well, Ms. Tolliver," she said.
"Don't."
"I'm going to."
"Please don't, I'll go to pieces in front of my employee."
"You made the stand," said the natural resources manager, and shook her hand, and Tori Delaney let out a noise like a teakettle and had to walk away for a minute.
Here is what the second September looked like.
Renee was up at five and had been for twenty-one months, out of habit now rather than insomnia.
Two hundred acres north of Livermore with a decreed water right, a barn, three employees, a second hoop house going up, and a contract book that ran into the year after next.
Phase II of the burn scar had gone out in March and she had won it too, and nobody in the county said one word about how it read, because the bench above Twenty-Six Road was green and anybody could drive up and look at it.
She had also, in April, turned down a job.
It was a good one — a restoration outfit out of Denver with real money behind it wanted to buy Tolliver Native Seed and keep her on to run it, and the number they said out loud was not small.
She sat with it for eleven days. Then she called them from the barn and said no, and hung up, and stood there for a minute grinning at a wall.
She told Chase that night.
That was the thing she noticed, telling him: eleven days, and she had not once thought I should ask him. She had thought I want to tell him when I've decided, which is a different sentence entirely, and she was thirty-nine years old before she understood that those two things were not the same.
He listened to the whole thing without saying anything.
Then he said, "Good," and asked what they had offered, and when she told him he whistled and said, "You should have got more," and went back to what he was doing, and that was the entire conversation and it was perfect.
The marriage did not look like the old one from the outside, either.
It looked like a man who came up on Thursday mornings and left on Sunday nights, and who was, as advertised, terrible at the work for about two years.
He could not tell a grass from a sedge in his first September.
He put a whole flat of plugs in backward in October and Tori had to be sent to the far end of the property so she could laugh.
He got better. By the second summer he could run the drill, and he had learned the ground the way he learned everything, which was slowly and completely and without ever once pretending he knew something he did not.
What he did not do was help.
Renee counted, privately, for about eight months, and stopped counting somewhere in the second spring.
No soil report she had not ordered. No guy from Fort Collins.
No folder. Twice he had come very close and both times he had stopped himself out loud, standing in a barn, saying, "I'm about to do the thing," and she had said, "You are," and he had put his hands in his pockets and shut up, and they had both found it funnier than it probably was.
And she said things in the room now.
That was the change she would have named first, if anybody had asked her. In the old marriage she had said the thing in the truck afterward, to nobody, at forty-five miles an hour.
It happened in April at Bette's table on Pine Street.
There were six of them at dinner and a man from the open space board — a decent man, seventy, who had known Chase since he was born — leaned back and said something about how good it was to see the two of them out again, and then said, to Chase, warmly:
"And she's kept that little seed business going. That's marvelous. Good for you both."
Little.
In the old marriage that would have gone into the truck with her.
She would have carried it down Pine Street and out onto the diagonal and said it out loud at forty-five miles an hour to a windshield, and by the time she got home she would have talked herself into it being nothing, and it would have gone on the list.
Renee put her fork down.
"It's not little," she said, pleasantly, across the table.
"I've got two hundred acres north of Livermore and three people on payroll, and I've got both phases of the county's burn revegetation, and this June I'll be the only outfit on the Front Range that's ever made an eighteen-month stand on a grass burn at that elevation.
So it's not a business Chase let me keep.
It's the largest native seed operation in two counties and I built all of it myself in eighteen months. "
There was a silence about four seconds long.
Renee picked her fork back up.
And she did not look at her husband, because she did not need to and because she was never going to need to again — but she heard him, on her left, say the only two words available to him:
"She's right."
The man from the open space board went red and then, to his considerable credit, said, "Well, hell. I'd like to come and see it," and meant it, and came in July.
Bette Ridgeway said nothing at all at the time.
She called Renee the next morning at seven, which was four hours earlier than Bette Ridgeway had telephoned anybody in fifty years, and said, "I have thought about that all night and I want you to know it was the single most enjoyable thing that has happened at that table since 1974," and hung up without saying goodbye.
Their public face was not managed by anybody. Danielle Keegan had called her exactly once in twenty-one months, in March, to ask how she was, and had not mentioned work, and Renee had liked her for it.
Bristlecone was smaller. It was profitable and it was smaller and it made imaging, and Gil Vogel ran it day to day and had a title now that reflected it, and had gotten a dog.
Kendall Croft was in Oregon. That was the only sentence about her, and Renee said it about once a year, to Maggie, as a measurement of how far away things had gotten.
They deeded the ridge in July.
That took eleven weeks and two lawyers, because it was not a simple thing: two hundred and eleven acres of burned land, held in Renee's name alone since January of the fire year, put into joint ownership and then restricted permanently — a conservation easement, native seed production and reclamation stock only, in perpetuity, in both their names, which meant neither of them could ever sell it and no house would ever be built on it again.
"You understand this is irreversible," the lawyer said, for the third time.
"That's the idea," Renee said.
The 1924 foundation stayed. They took the fence off the cellar and left the hole open, and Renee planted it — the whole floor of it, wall to wall, in a mix she wrote herself and did not put in any bid: blue grama and prairie junegrass and a little bluestem, in a stone room ten feet down with light coming into it for about six hours a day.
Fenner built the steps. Not new ones — he reset the old concrete ones, which had come through the fire, and put a rail on them, and would not take a dollar for it.
"It's a hole in the ground with grass in it," he said, when he was done, standing at the top with his hands on his hips.
"It is."
"Some people'd fill it."
"I know," Renee said.
Truman Fenner looked down into it for a while.
"No," he said. "You leave it."
They were married on the ridge on the twentieth of September, at four in the afternoon, on the grass that used to be the yard.
The county came.
That was not a figure of speech. Bette Ridgeway had a list and abandoned it in about week two, and in the end there were something over two hundred people on that hill: Fenner and Anna and their whole outfit, Gil Vogel and most of Bristlecone, Kyle Whitcomb, Hugh Prentiss at seventy-six in a bolo tie, Tori Delaney, the natural resources manager in something that was not a fleece, Alison Dunlap, four people from the Wiggins drill crew, and Nina Ackley, who came as a guest and left her notebook in the car and said so at the gate so that nobody would wonder.
The man from the trailer park at the bottom of the canyon came.
The schoolteacher came. The woman who had stood at the microphone in January and could not say anything came, and hugged Renee for a long time, and said, "You said the coverage map," and Renee said, "You went back and finished, in April," and the woman said, "I did, didn't I," and they both had to stop for a second.
Nine hundred households. About a hundred and fifty of them sent something.
Maggie Sutter stood up with her in a dress and swore about it continuously for two days beforehand and then cried through the entire ceremony without making a single sound.
Bette Ridgeway wore gray and sat in the front row and held her son's hand for eleven seconds before he stood up, and told Renee afterward, "I have been to four weddings on this hill and this is the only one I have enjoyed," which from Bette was the roof coming off.