Part 5
Curt took his hand back and put it in his pocket.
Deb came down off the porch. She didn’t hurry either. “Ardith calls her that,” she said. “I figured it was Ardith’s name for her.”
“Ardith calls her that because I did.” He looked at the mare, not at Deb. Then, maybe because he’d been caught already and saw no use in being caught halfway, he told it, mostly to the horse.
In March of 1999 he’d been nineteen and working for Amos Tolliver against his father’s wishes. Leland Selden and Amos hadn’t spoken a civil word since the land sale, and Curt had liked Amos better than anyone on his own side of the fence. Amos’s best mare died foaling in a spring snowstorm. For six weeks Curt slept in the Tolliver barn and got up every two hours to feed the filly from a calf bottle. He named her for the yellow tansy along the ditch bank, which she’d been too smart to eat. When Amos died and the estate sold the horses, Ardith Quale bought her. Ardith wouldn’t have sold a Selden a cup of coffee. He’d asked anyway, every couple of years.
“So you knew where she was,” Deb said. “Seventeen years.”
“I drove past her twice a day.”
Deb laid out what she’d pieced together on the porch while he talked about his accountant. She kept her voice level, the way she did with people who came to the counter angry about a package. “You didn’t want her on this place. The first morning she was here, she’d walk to that gate. The first time anybody opened it, she’d go straight to the top tank. And whoever followed her would find the pipe.”
His face changed then, though not much. It reminded her of the lodge at night, the lights going out one building at a time until only the office stayed lit.
“That line’s been dead since Amos died,” he said. “Nobody’s taken water through it in—”
“My husband carried water up that hill in buckets for two summers after your pond went in.” She felt her voice start to go and brought it back. “He thought the drought did it. I’ve got a camera picture of your cap, Curt. I’ve got the paper Amos made your father sign. I’ve been to Grand Junction.”
He was quiet. The mare had drifted down the fence toward the hay.
When he spoke again he sounded like the man on her step with the accountant’s number, only more tired. The lodge carried a note at the bank bigger than her whole place was worth. His father had left him three hundred cows and a debt the size of the cows, and he’d turned that into the only business on the mesa that hired anybody under thirty. The pond was the lodge. Couples booked the cabins for the pond, got married in front of it, and their friends booked the cabins the following year.
“Nobody gets married in front of a stock tank, Deb. That spring goes down to your tank, my pond drops a foot every August, and I’m finished.”
“Then you should have come and asked me,” Deb said. “Instead of cutting it.”
“I’ll make you one more offer. I’ll make it a good one, and it’ll be the last.” He opened his truck door. “Think about your boy before you answer.”
Elaine’s letter went out the following Tuesday, certified, return receipt requested. On Thursday it came through the Piñon Flats post office into Deb’s own case, in the slot for Selden Ridge Lodge. It was her route, so it was hers to deliver. She drove it up his road herself and honked at the box. Curt walked down and signed the green card on the hood of her car with her pen, and neither of them said a word.
That night Jace said what he’d been not saying. He’d read Elaine’s estimate where Deb had left it on the table. Take the money, he said. Whatever Curt brings. Put up Dad’s stone. Drill a real well. Find homes for half the horses with people who’ll ride them.
“You don’t owe Dad a lawsuit.”
“It isn’t for your dad.”
“Then who’s it for? The horse?” He shoved back from the table. “I’ve been here since March. I’ve been telling Ty no since June because you’re out there at two in the morning with a flashlight in your teeth, moving a hose, and you won’t let me do it. If you take the money, I can go. That’s the truth, and I’m not proud of it.”
She told herself she hadn’t known about June. She had.
Curt came Saturday at ten. He laid two things on her kitchen table: a release of every right reserved in Book 233, Page 418, together with a deed to the fourteen acres, both ready to sign, and a cashier’s check for ninety thousand dollars made out to Deborah Halloran, in a cream envelope with the lodge’s logo in the corner. Jace stood at the counter with his arms folded. Curt walked her through it, and he was good at it. He’d sold a lot of weddings.
Deb read every page. She read the check twice. Ninety thousand dollars was a granite stone, a deep well, and Jace in Wyoming with nothing to feel guilty about. It was every winter’s hay for as long as Pie had teeth to chew it. It was more money than she had ever seen on a single piece of paper.
She thought about the fishhook in the margin of the title policy. Dennis had wondered, and then he hadn’t followed up, because following up meant lawyers and the Seldens and money they didn’t have. So he’d carried buckets instead.
She got up and took her route bag off the hook by the door and found her pen, the black one she used on the road. She slid the check back into its envelope. Across the front, under the lodge’s logo, she wrote REFUSED in the same capitals she had written on the hood of her car more times than she could count. She added her initials and the date. Then she pushed it back across the table.
“Return to sender,” she said.
Curt looked at the envelope a long time. “Elaine Mortensen bills by the hour,” he said. “I’ve got a firm in Denver that bills by the minute. You understand what this is going to cost you?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
He turned to the counter. “Help her out, Jace. You’re the one with sense in this house.”
Jace looked at his mother’s handwriting on the envelope for a while. “Her name’s on the deed,” he said. He went out the back door, and the screen banged behind him.
Curt left a few minutes later. Deb sat alone at the table with the coffee can.
At 5:40 the next morning Jace was already at the barn, which he never was. He had fed. His duffel bag was in the bed of his truck. He’d called Ty at midnight. The crew pulled out of Gillette on Tuesday, and he’d be on it.
“I’ll send money for Elaine,” he said. “Every check. You put the rock money back in the can, Mom. Leave Dad’s stone alone…”
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