Chapter 21: What It Costs

On the last Thursday in May, Iris drove me to Billings.

She took the Ford, and she took the wheel, and I sat in the passenger seat of my own truck.

Dottie rode between us on the bench with her glasses on her head.

She had a cigarette in her fingers that she wasn't allowed to light.

She said nothing for ninety miles.

At the edge of the city Iris glanced at me.

"Eyes on the road," I said, because it was habit.

"I'm looking at the road, Jack."

"I know."

"Then why did you say it?"

I didn't have an answer, and Dottie coughed into her fist.

The lawyer's office was on the third floor of a brown brick building with a glass door.

A clerk at the front desk stood up when we came in and did not sit down again.

I knew why.

Five of the letters in the safe had her name at the bottom.

The lawyer was a woman in her fifties with grey hair cut at the jaw.

She had no softness around the mouth.

She shook Iris's hand and Dottie's, and she did not offer hers to me.

"Mr. Tarrant," she said. "Sit."

I sat.

She laid a folder on the table between us.

"Ms. Crockett asked me to draw up two papers. One of them is for you to sign."

"I'll sign anything she wants."

"You haven't read it."

"I don't need to."

"You will anyway," Iris said. "Out loud, please."

The lawyer slid the paper across.

It gave Iris half of the Tarrant ranch, six thousand acres of grass and breaks, in her own name.

Her name sat beside mine on the deed, equal in size.

It said that neither of us could sell without the other.

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