Page 66 of Omega’s Fold

“Fine.”

“Caleb.”

“I said fine!”

After a while I sit down on the edge of the water trough beside the barn. The trough is dry. It has been dry since spring. I had been meaning, every week for six months, to pull it out and turn it on its side and sell it for scrap, and I have not done it, and I am, this afternoon, glad I have not done it, because I needed something to sit on.

Caleb glances at me.

“You okay?”

“Sit down a minute, would you.”

He sets the rope down. He comes over. He sits on the trough beside me. He is very nearly as tall as I am now.

“I need to tell you something. I had a realtor come out yesterday. I’m putting the ranch up at auction. She thinks she has buyers. She said she didn’t think it would sell at first but she’s had two phone calls in the last two weeks and she thinks it might. There’s a viewing tomorrow at one. Two parties. Maybe three. I haven’t said yes to the auction yet but I’m going to.”

The wind has come up from the south the way it does in the afternoons, and it is moving the long grass in the near pasture in slow waves.

Somewhere out beyond the ridge a tractor is moving and the sound of the engine reaches us across the valley. Caleb’s hands are on his knees. They are still.

“Why?”

“I don’t think I have a choice. The mortgage is too big and I can’t afford the payments. The bank has given me a payment holiday but that just buys us time. It doesn’t buy us the place. If I can sell it in the holiday, the bank gets paid out clean and we walk off with maybe a little. If I can’t sell it in the holiday, the bank takes it and we walk off with nothing. The realtor thinks if she lists it now we have a chance. If we wait we don’t.”

He looks down at his hands.

“Where do we go?”

“I don’t know yet. I was thinking the apartments above the hardware store in Eastfield. Mr. Halsey said he’d ask his cousin. There’s school there. There’s work there for me, maybe. I was thinking we’d go and have a look at the apartments next week, the three of us.”

“For all four of us.”

“What?”

“There’s four of us now.”

The wind moves the grass.

“Yes,” I say. “For all four of us. You’re right.”

He does not say anything for a while.

He nods slowly. He puts his hands on his knees and pushes himself up off the trough and he stands a minute with his back to me, looking out at the pasture, and he does not turn round.

I stand up and I put a hand on the back of his neck the way I did when he was little and he was worried about something.

He does not lean into it. He does not pull away from it. He stands and he lets me have my hand on the back of his neck and he looks out at the grass.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I know.”

“I’m going to tell Matthew tomorrow. Just don’t say anything until I’ve had a chance please. I think it needs to come from me.”

I drop my hand. He picks the rope up from where he had set it down. He wraps it round his elbow. He does not build the loop again. He walks toward the barn with the rope coiled over his arm, and he does not look back.

I sit on the trough for a while. Long enough that the shadow of the barn has moved across the dirt and the chickens have come out of the run and started doing their slow afternoon foraging round my boots. I do not move. The sun is on the side of my face. The wind is in the grass.