Chapter 3 #2
Nothing in that world had ever been hers alone. She'd known that in an abstract way for twelve years. It was different when it was your own week being handed around.
Delphine Sturges came at three, in a car she had driven herself, in the wrong shoes, up a road that had four inches of new snow on it.
Tess watched her get out and pick her way to the porch and thought, with a kind of horrified admiration, that the woman had done all that on purpose.
"You could have called."
"I could have," Delphine agreed. "Then it would have been a call."
She came in and did not take her coat off and refused coffee and stood in the kitchen with her reading glasses hanging on their chain, and got to it.
"I'm not here on his behalf. I want to be clear about that first, because you'll want to know how to read what I say next.
" She put a thin envelope on the table. "On Tuesday morning Porter instructed the firm in writing that no member of it is to take an adverse position against you in any matter, at any time, in any forum, and that if you retain counsel we are to give them whatever they ask for on the first request. He also directed that certain assets be placed beyond his reach and into yours, irrevocably, effective immediately.
That is done. It was done that same afternoon. "
Tess looked at the envelope and did not touch it.
"Tuesday morning."
"Yes."
"He told me Tuesday night."
"That's right."
So he had done it before. Before the kitchen. Before the legal pad. Before he had any idea she'd found the gate log — he had gotten up on Tuesday morning knowing what he was carrying and had spent the day making sure that whatever happened next, she could not be hurt by it.
"Did he ask you to tell me this?"
"No."
"Did he tell you not to?"
Delphine's mouth moved very slightly. "He said, and I'm quoting, she's not to find out from me. Which I took to be an instruction not to use it. I've decided to read it narrowly."
"Why."
"Because you should have the information," Delphine said.
"People make bad decisions in the dark and I've watched two of these from close up.
" She picked up her gloves. "I'm not going to tell you what to think of him.
I'd be no good at it and you'd resent it.
I'll tell you one thing and then I'll drive back down that road in these shoes. "
"Go ahead."
"In twenty-six years I have never seen a Thayer decline a lever," Delphine said.
"Not once. Not one of them. It's not that they're cruel — it's that a lever is there, and they are the kind of people who pick things up.
" She pulled the gloves on. "He put them all down before you asked him to.
I don't know what that's worth. It's not nothing. "
She got to the door.
"Delphine."
The lawyer stopped.
"Is Marin gone?"
"Monday," Delphine said. "I've seen the paper."
She called a lawyer at four thirty, standing in the tack room with the light going blue outside.
She used the first name she found, the way Toni had said. Bannon, Kirk & Ostrom, on Lincoln in Steamboat, three names on a sign above a ski shop. The woman who answered said Mr. Bannon was with someone. Tess said she'd hold.
"This is Dale Bannon."
"My name is Tess Thayer. I'd like to retain you."
A pause. Not a long one, but she heard it.
"All right," he said. "For what."
"I don't know yet. My husband and I have separated as of Tuesday.
There's a house up on the county road that's in both our names, there's a marital estate that I could not describe to you accurately if you paid me, and there is a law firm in Denver with twenty-six years of history with this family who have been instructed not to fight me. "
"Instructed by whom?"
"By him."
Another pause, longer.
"Mrs. Thayer, I want to say something and I want you to take it the right way. I've practiced in this county for thirty-one years. What you're describing is well past me on the money side and you're going to want somebody in Denver eventually."
"I know."
"Then—"
"I don't want somebody in Denver," Tess said.
"Everybody in Denver has had dinner at my house.
I want somebody who's never met any of them, who I pay, who works for me.
" She looked out the window at the corral fence going dark.
"You can hand it off to whoever you want later.
Today I want a person on my side of the line. That's all I'm buying."
Dale Bannon thought about it.
"Two thousand to open a file," he said.
"Fine."
"And Mrs. Thayer — don't sign anything. Not a thing. Not a card, not a receipt, not something that comes over from a nice lawyer who drove all the way up here in the snow."
Tess looked at the thin envelope on the kitchen table across the hall, which she had still not touched.
"Understood," she said.
She hung up and stood there and noticed that her hands were steady, and that something in her chest had eased about a quarter turn, and that it had cost two thousand dollars and one phone call, and that she had waited six weeks to feel it.
The light went early and the temperature fell off a cliff, and Tess and Toni ate rice and beans at the kitchen table with the stove roaring and the wind starting up in the eaves.
The text came at seven.
One conversation. I'll drive up and drive back the same night. If you say no I won't ask again this week.
Tess read it twice and set the phone down and went on eating for a minute.
"That him?"
"Yeah."
"What's he want."
"To come up. One conversation."
Toni put her fork down.
Neither of them said anything. The stove ticked. Somewhere out past the corral a branch let go under the snow load and hit the ground with a soft thump.
"He put the ranch in my name on Wednesday," Tess said. "Or something like it. He did it before he knew I knew. He gave up everything he could have used before he ever sat down in front of me."
"I heard the lady."
"So what do I do with that?"
"Nothing," Toni said. "That's the whole point. There's nothing to do with it. It's a good thing he did and it doesn't buy him anything and you don't owe him a phone call for it." She said it evenly. "And you're going to say yes anyway."
Tess picked up the phone.
She looked at the message for a long moment, and then typed ok, and it went with that small stupid sound, and her whole chest came loose in a way that scared her badly.
Toni watched her do it.
"That's how it happens," she said.
"Don't."
"I'm not being smart with you." Toni's voice had gone gentle, which was so much worse. "I'm telling you because I love you and because nobody told me. It doesn't happen with the big stuff. Nobody ever went back for the big stuff. You go back one ok at a time."