Part 2
She unlocked the padlock and let the chain fall.
It rang against the post loud enough that Pearl flinched in the shade. Up on the county road, the white truck sat a moment longer, then pulled off the shoulder and rolled on toward the lodge. Jo didn’t watch it go.
“I don’t know what you do,” she told Abe. “I’m telling you that up front.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “Most of it’s not doing.”
He walked her through it while the others came in, latching the gate behind them without being asked. There were eight in all: a woman in hospital scrubs under a fleece jacket, a heavyset man of about fifty who kept his hands jammed in his pockets, two sisters in matching knitted hats, Teresa from Montrose, who hugged Jo without asking and then looked mortified, and a young man who said nothing and went straight to the far end of the bleacher.
The rules were simple, and Mags had evidently never written them down. Phones stayed in the cars. No food in your pockets, ever, because a llama who learns to mug a pocket stops being a llama you can sit beside. You didn’t reach for an animal. If one came to you, you let it decide how close and how long. No talking above library level, and better not at all. You stayed about an hour and a half, until the shed’s shadow reached the second fence post, and then you left without a fuss.
“And there’s the can,” Abe said.
It was a coffee can wired to the end of the bleacher frame, with a slot cut in the plastic lid. A strip of masking tape on its side read, in marker, WHAT YOU CAN.
Then they sat. The man with his hands in his pockets didn’t sit. He stood by the corner post with his back against it, and nobody told him otherwise.
Jo stayed near the gate for the first twenty minutes because she didn’t know where else to put herself. For sixteen years she had worked with a headset over one ear and a radio in the other, in a room built to hold fifty conversations at once, none of them good. Since Dean, the noise had moved inside her. She heard it while brushing her teeth: the beep of a new call, a woman’s voice saying he’s not breathing, her own voice answering.
Here there was wind in the rabbitbrush and a magpie somewhere. There was the soft sideways grinding of thirty-three jaws, like someone sanding wood very patiently. Now and then a llama made a small questioning sound to another one, and that was all.
After half an hour, Hollis walked out of the shade. He went to Abe, stopped about eight feet off, and considered him with his head high. Then he folded his legs under himself in sections, hind end first, like a camp chair collapsing. He stayed there chewing, eyes half closed, and Abe sat with his hands loose on his knees and didn’t move.
Pearl took longer. She drifted toward the woman in scrubs, swinging her head to bring her good eye around, and lay down beside the woman’s boots, close enough to touch. The woman didn’t touch her. After a while, her shoulders came down from around her ears.
Jo went and sat on the very end of the bleacher. She didn’t decide to. Her legs just took her there.
When the shadow reached the second fence post, people stood, stretched, and left in the order they had come. Teresa squeezed Jo’s arm on the way out. The young man nodded to her, the only thing he’d done all afternoon. Abe was last, his unused chair under his arm.
“She never called it anything,” he said at the gate. “We called it sitting. Margaret said that sounded like something you’d do in jail, but it stuck.” He looked back at the shed, where Hollis was getting up one joint at a time. “I came the first time three months after my wife died. My daughter brought me. I was so angry I could hardly see. I sat over there and waited for something to happen, and nothing happened, and I came back the next week to see if nothing would happen again.”
“Did it?”
“Every Thursday for six years.” He put his hat on. “Mags never advertised. People told people, usually somebody who’d buried somebody. Some weeks she’d have fourteen, some weeks three. Never more than fifteen. She said past fifteen they start noticing each other instead of the animals.”
Jo carried the coffee can into the kitchen and counted it on the oilcloth. Two hundred twelve dollars, mostly fives and tens, with a twenty folded small and tucked under the rest.
Teague called a little after six.
“I counted eight cars at your gate today,” he said pleasantly.
“Six.”
“Six, then.” He paused, as if she had corrected his grammar. “I’d be careful there, Joanna. Your parcel’s zoned agricultural. Running admissions out there is a commercial use. Margaret got away with it because nobody wanted to bother an old woman. The county will feel differently about somebody from Denver.”
“Is that a warning or a forecast?”
“It’s neighborly,” he said. “Which reminds me. I bought Ed Kowalczyk’s second and third cutting this week. I mention it because I believe Margaret got her winter feed from Ed. I need the bedding for the lodge horses.”
She didn’t answer. He wished her a good evening.
In the morning she drove into town to the feed co-op. On the counter by the register sat a stack of glossy brochures for Kettle Butte Lodge, a cabin roof glowing under a sky full of stars. Jo pushed them aside to make room for her elbows.
Lorna, behind the counter, had known Mags for twenty years and said so twice before she said anything useful. There was no local hay to be had. A dry summer, a short second cutting, and now Kowalczyk’s whole stack was spoken for. Lorna could have it trucked in from western Nebraska. She worked the numbers on a calculator with a cracked screen and turned it around so Jo could read it.
For thirty-three llamas through the end of April, with freight, minerals, and the vet’s winter visit, it came to roughly $27,800. The broker wanted $9,000 down by October 10 to hold a load.
“Mags paid late,” Lorna said. “Every year, for eleven years. Never once didn’t pay.” She said it as if handing over a coat Jo didn’t know she’d need.
Jo sat in Mags’s truck in the co-op lot with the engine off. After the funeral, the hospital bills, and the months she hadn’t worked, what was left of Dean’s life insurance came to just over $41,000. It was the only money she had that wasn’t a paycheck. It was the money that would let her walk back into the communications center in January without being afraid of the rent.
She pictured Hollis folding himself down eight feet from an old man who’d been too angry to see.
She went back inside and wrote Lorna a check for nine thousand dollars. Then, still standing at the counter, she called the county and asked for whoever decided what counted as farming.
The man who answered listened to the whole thing without interrupting. When she gave the parcel address, he was quiet a moment.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I already have a folder on that parcel. Warren Teague called in July and asked me what it would take to shut your aunt down…”
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