Chapter 14: The Price

A house in Colorado with a room for the youngest.

I had turned it over all night, and it had not gotten smaller.

My lawyer called at seven on Sunday morning, while I was still pulling on my boots.

"She's bought a house for my girl," I said before she could start. "Dina means to take her."

"Then we move faster," she said. "I've talked to a firm in Boise," she said. "Idaho splits what a couple built together down the middle."

"The brokerage account," I said.

"The one you've balanced every month for twelve years."

"Two hundred and twelve thousand, last statement."

"If we file there and ask for temporary orders, a judge can free your half of it early. Your husband's own books are the reason."

"That covers the county," I said.

"It covers the county and a little more. A hearing in Boise on the seventh, if they'll give us the date."

I hung up and stood in the kitchen with the sun coming through the cold window.

For the first time in weeks, I could see the whole road.

And there was one more thing I wanted off the table before I started down it.

I had a debt on that road, and it was not to a lawyer.

I figured it out on a legal pad.

Thirty-one bales of hay at eight dollars.

Four afternoons of labor on the roof, at the rate in the county paper.

A new stove gasket, a sack of coffee, and the feed I had asked for.

It came to two thousand, six hundred and ten dollars, and I wrote it on a check in my square bookkeeper's hand.

Jed came in at noon with the dog behind him.

He stopped when he saw the check on the table.

Beside it was a lease I had typed: the north pasture, his cattle, a fair rate per head.

"What's this?"

"What I owe you. And what I'd like to owe you going forward, so there's no confusion."

He read the lease once.

His face did not change at all.

"You think I want your grass," he said.

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