Part 2
Dana didn’t say a word about the bank. She reached into his shirt pocket, took his phone, found Curtis’s name, and handed it back to him already ringing.
Curtis answered from somewhere loud, a ballfield by the sound of it. Dale told him about the den, the wire, and the pile. There was a long pause, and a child yelled for somebody to throw it home.
“I’ll come up at four,” Curtis said. “Don’t let anybody near that pile. Including you.”
Curtis’s grandmother had lived on the next ridge. When Curtis was twelve, Dale had taught him to splice rope on her porch steps, and when he was nineteen and couldn’t stand another day on a line crew, Dale had been the one to tell him there was no shame in going to cut timber with his uncle. He’d built a decent business since. He came up the drive at four exactly, in a pickup with a stave buyer’s contract on the dash, and walked the landing without saying much.
“The loader needs this whole deck,” he said finally, standing well back from the pile. “I can’t swing log trucks around that thing, and my loader man won’t work fifty feet from a mad cat, and I don’t blame him. That leaves two ways. I wait until the kittens move on, which is fall, maybe later. My crew goes to a job in Arkansas the first of August, and I won’t be back here until after New Year’s. The stave mill’s paying well this summer. I wouldn’t count on that in January.”
“And the other way?”
Curtis pointed up the slope, past the oaks, to where the gravel ridge road came closest. “New deck up there. Dozer day, rock, a culvert so it doesn’t wash. Twenty-six hundred, maybe more. And the contract says I build you one landing. It doesn’t say two.”
Dana was standing beside the truck with her arms folded. She looked at her father.
The stave buyer’s fifty-five-hundred-dollar advance had gone straight to the well driller in May, and the new well was scheduled for September. Dale had already done this arithmetic once, in the hayloft, while he waited for Marisol. A second landing would leave him about two thousand dollars short when the drill rig came up the drive.
“I’ll pay for the second landing,” he said.
“Dad. That’s the well.”
“The pump’s running.”
“Because you’re pouring water into it out of a milk jug.”
Curtis looked from one of them to the other and folded the contract. “I’ll do the dozer work at my cost,” he said to Dana, not to Dale. “Rock’s still rock. Somebody’s got to pay for it.” He shook Dale’s hand the way he had at twelve, when Dale paid him a quarter for every splice that held. “I’ll have the machine off that pile by tonight.”
In the kitchen, Dana put the biscuits in the oven to warm, though it was nearly suppertime. She found the well driller’s estimate on the refrigerator under a seed-company magnet and took it down.
“I can cover the rock,” she said.
“No.”
“I’m not asking whether you want me to.”
“I said no, Dana.”
She put the estimate back under the magnet and lined it up square, the way her mother used to. When she turned around, she used the low, even voice she kept for callers who were about to panic.
“You do this. You find something good and you sit with it alone, and then something goes wrong and you fix it alone, and I hear about it after.” She pulled the biscuits out with a dish towel and burned her thumb anyway. “Three weeks, Dad. I’d have come up every morning. I’d have brought the coffee.”
He ran cold water over her thumb. She let him.
“You’d sit up all night with those cats if somebody let you,” she said, softer. “Like with Mom. Three nights in that chair, and then you finally drifted off right at the end.” She shook her head. “I was angry about that for a whole year. Then I wasn’t. Anybody would have.”
Dale turned off the water and handed her the towel.
He had not drifted off. He had been awake for every one of the last breaths, Carol’s hand in his and the oxygen machine sighing in the corner, and Dana asleep on the couch twelve feet away after a double shift. At five that morning he had gone to wake her and told her he must have dozed. She had cried, and then she had forgiven him for sleeping. He had let her.
Marisol called at nine. The kitten was female, about six weeks old. The vet had taken one toe on the left hind foot, the outside one. The rest should heal clean if she kept the bandage on, which she was currently trying very hard not to do.
“Two weeks, maybe three,” Marisol said. “But it only works if her mother’s still around to take her. Get a camera on that pile. Not close.”
“Does she have a name?”
“She’s intake seventeen this year. I don’t name the ones going back.”
After Dana drove home, Dale wrote 17 on the kitchen calendar and drew a circle around it. Then he found the trail camera Carol had bought to catch whatever kept stealing her tomatoes, and in the last light he strapped it to a fence post sixty yards from the landing.
The next evening he pulled the card. Most of the clips showed the mother carrying a rabbit, kittens wrestling at the pile’s edge, and a raccoon. The last one was from the gully. The mother stood at the coil of cut wire and pushed her nose through the mesh where the kitten had hung. She called down into the washout, three times, then sat and waited with her tail wrapped around her feet.
He watched it twice. Then he sent it to Dana before he could decide not to.
Her reply arrived while the phone was still in his hand. That’s how you sat with Mom. Right up until you fell asleep…
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