Chapter 16 #2
"Say it back. I mean it. Say it back, because I am not having a version of this in October where you thought there was a deal."
"There's no deal," Porter said. "You've promised me nothing. If I do it and you never speak to me again, that was the arrangement and I knew it when I said yes."
"Once more."
He almost smiled, and then didn't.
"Tess," he said. "You've promised me nothing. I know."
She walked him out to the truck at half past ten and neither of them said much.
At the door he stopped.
"Can I say one thing that isn't about the twenty-sixth."
"Go on."
"My father will do something," he said. "Between now and then.
He's already trying the easement — no, don't, Delphine didn't tell me, I've known since Tuesday because Ed's replacement rang me about a title search and had no idea what he was handling.
" He put his hand on the door. "He'll try something else when that fails.
I can't stop him and I'm not going to be able to protect you from it, and I want you to hear me say that out loud instead of finding out I knew. "
"Okay."
"That's all."
He got in.
She stood there with her hand on the roof of the truck and found, to her considerable annoyance, that she was not finished.
"Porter."
"Yeah."
"I want to say the true thing, because I've asked you for a lot of true things tonight.
" She looked at the ground and then made herself look at him.
"I don't know what I'm going to do. That's not a tactic.
When you're standing up there on the twenty-sixth I will genuinely not know, and I want you going into that meadow understanding that I'm not withholding an answer from you. I don't have one."
Porter looked at her for a long moment.
"Tess," he said, "that's the first thing anybody's given me since October," and started the truck and drove down the county road.
Toni got it out of her on the seventeenth, in the barn, and did not react the way Tess expected.
She listened to the whole thing — the meadow, the parking, the two conditions, the you get nothing — with a hoof pick in her hand and her face absolutely blank.
Then she said, "The first one's good."
"Which first one?"
"Never checking." Toni put the foot down.
"That's the best thing you've ever done.
I've watched three women do this and every single one of them turned into a jailer, and being a jailer is worse than being left, and I have never known how to tell anybody that.
" She straightened up. "You just handed him a rope and told him you're not going to hold the other end of it.
That's not soft. That's the hardest version there is. "
"And the second one?"
"The second one I hate."
"Why?"
"Because a hundred and forty people are going to watch a man do the worst four minutes of his life out loud in a tent," Toni said, "and about ninety of them are going to enjoy it, and I do not like you being in a room where people are enjoying that.
It doesn't matter that he earned it. You'll be standing there in the middle of it and it'll be about you, and you have had a year of being about you. "
Tess had not thought about that at all.
"I could take it back."
"Don't you dare take it back." Toni picked up the next foot. "It's right. It's just going to cost you something and I'd rather you knew what before you're standing in it. Wear the boots. Don't wear a dress."
"It's a benefit."
"Wear the boots," Toni said.
The tent went up on the twenty-fourth.
Tess had thought she would mind it more than she did.
Twelve men and two trucks and a marquee eighty feet long going up on the lower meadow where a helicopter had sat in April, and a generator, and a refrigerated truck, and by four in the afternoon there was a lighting rig on her hayground and a woman with a headset asking her where the power was.
She watched from the corral rail with a cup of coffee.
It did not feel like an invasion, which surprised her. It felt like weather — like something arriving that would be gone by Sunday.
That was the thing that told her how far the year had actually moved.
In December this ground had been the place she ran to.
In July it was hers with a permit on the drainage above it and nine head in the meadow and a tent full of strangers she had personally granted access to, in writing, with a clause about the county road.
At six the woman with the headset came and asked, very carefully, whether "the family" would be arriving Friday or Saturday.
"I don't know," Tess said. "I'm not the family. I'm the landowner."
The woman wrote it down, and then looked up, and then decided not to say anything, and Tess drank her coffee and did not help her out of it.
Across the whole of those ten days, the pressure never once let up.
The easement went nowhere, because Delphine had killed it on the twelfth and had, Tess suspected, made a number of telephone calls she would never hear about.
What came instead was smaller and more personal and much more Whit: a note, handwritten, on his own paper, three lines long, saying that he trusted she would not permit a family occasion to become a spectacle, and that his late wife had loved that meadow.
Tess read it standing in the yard and then put it in the second drawer with the rest of them.
She did not answer it. She did not cancel anything.
She did not move the date and she did not call Porter and she did not, in ten days, once discuss with a single human being what she was going to do on the twenty-sixth, because she did not know, and because a woman who has been hurried once in her life is entitled to take the whole of the time available.
Toni asked her twice and got nothing.
On the twenty-fifth, Toni said, "Are you going to be all right tomorrow?"
"No idea," said Tess, and went out to move the string off the meadow.