Part 4
She made the calls standing up, because that was how she’d always taken the bad ones.
There were 148 people booked through the second week of January. She called every one herself. Most of them were kind. A few were angry, and she let them be. One woman in Ouray cried, then apologized for crying, then asked if she could just come sit by the road. Jo told her it was a public road and she couldn’t stop her. It was the best she could do.
The couple from Grand Junction had already arrived. They were at the west gate at ten minutes to two on Saturday, in a sedan with a ski rack, because they’d turned off their phone for the drive on purpose. Jo walked out, told them in person, and handed back seventy dollars in cash from the coffee can. The husband said it was fine. The wife said nothing. She looked past Jo at the shed corner, where Hollis and the others were already standing in the shade, waiting, and then she got back in the car.
The refunds came to $5,180. Jo paid all of them within four days, by check or in cash at the gate. Then she sat at the kitchen table with the steno pad and Dean’s insurance statement and did the arithmetic three ways. The second Nebraska load was due before Christmas, with the balance. If she paid for that, the hearing, and the lawyer she had just started to need, about four thousand dollars would be left on January 15. If she lost the hearing, she would have the animals, the hay, the land, and nothing to live on.
There was a voicemail from Renee on her cell. They were short three dispatchers for the holidays, and the director wanted to know about January. People ask for you, Jo. They call back and ask for the lady from before. Renee needed an answer by the 15th, sooner if she could manage it.
On the first Thursday after the suspension, Jo didn’t plan to go out to the bleacher. At 1:40 she was washing a pot when she saw them through the window over the sink. Hollis came down the trail, then Pearl, swinging her head to keep her good eye on the path, then the crooked-jawed gelding and the rest. They took their places in the shade and stood facing the empty planks.
Jo dried her hands and put on her coat.
She sat in the middle of the bleacher, where Abe usually sat. For a long time nothing happened. The wind came off the San Juans and found the gap at her collar. Then, at about the time the shadow touched the first fence post, Hollis came out of the shade, stopped eight feet from her, and folded himself down, hind end first, as he did for Abe.
She talked to him. She hadn’t meant to do that either. She told him about the woman on the kitchen floor in April, about hearing the compressions working, the woman counting out loud, the man not coming back. She told him she had heard ten thousand of those calls and been fine, and then one night she wasn’t. She told him nobody had asked her about it in almost two years, because everybody knew she was the steady one. Hollis chewed and looked at the mountains, and clearly didn’t think any of it was his business. That was the first time since Dean died that Jo cried in front of anything alive.
Teague came on the last day of November.
He sat in the same chair at the same oilcloth, and this time he explained nothing. He set a typed offer on the table: five hundred fifteen thousand dollars, cash, closing by the end of January, good until December 8, the day before the hearing.
“That’s a better number than this place is worth on paper,” he said. “Put it in front of any appraiser in the county.”
“Why?”
He looked at her a while. Outside, a magpie was walking the porch rail.
“When I was nineteen,” he said, “my dad sold our home place to a man from Phoenix who cut it into thirty-five-acre ranchettes. Every one of them got a yard light. You could stand on Kettle Butte at night and count them, like somebody’d spilled a box of thumbtacks on the valley. My dad stood out there counting them every night until he died.” He turned his hat in his hands. “I’ve spent thirty years buying those lots back and pulling the poles out. When I’m done, this will be the darkest valley in the state. Margaret’s place is a hole in the middle of that. You’re one bad year from selling to somebody who’ll put up a pole barn with a sodium light the size of the moon.”
“So you’d like me to sell to you first.”
“I’d like you to sell to somebody who’ll keep it the way it is,” he said. “Which is me.”
He meant it. That was what kept her awake that night. He wasn’t lying. He believed he was the land’s best steward, and he might even be right, and he had still spent three months telling her to her face that it was worthless.
She didn’t call him. On December 3 she drove to the hardware store in Tamarack for a heat-tape timer for the water tank, sat in the truck afterward holding the receipt, and caught herself counting the hours it would take to drive back to Denver. The offer was in the glove box. It would pay off everything. The old llamas would go to a woman in New Mexico Jo had never met, she would never see Hollis fold himself down again, and she would walk back onto the floor in January with a headset in her hand.
When she got home, Dani’s car was idling by the west gate, the hospice parking pass on the dash.
“I wasn’t going to bother you,” Dani said through the window. “I was going to sit by the road. But remember that wedding family I told you about? The mother left this in a patient’s room.” She held it out. “I thought you should see it.”
It was a brochure for Kettle Butte Lodge, the same heavy matte paper Jo had pushed aside at the co-op counter in September. She opened it standing in the road.
The inside spread was a photograph taken at dusk from the lodge’s ridge, looking west. The sky was going indigo. A long sweep of pasture without a light, a building, or a wire ran down to the foot of the mountains, and in the middle distance, small but perfectly clear, a white-faced llama stood beside an open shed.
The caption under Hollis read: Our neighbors to the west keep the nights dark and the evenings still…
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