Chapter 14 The Brother Counts It Out

The shop was called Ambrose Repair and had been called Ambrose Repair since 1974 and had been a going concern since 1988 and had been, in the year that this story takes place, a business with a man in it. Boone was at the bench from seven to five and the compressor ran the entire time, and he kept a notebook, and in the notebook he had written out in February what he owed and to whom, in a hand that got worse as it went down the page. Two hundred and forty thousand on the line of credit, secured, at a rate that had looked like a favor in 2021 and was not one now. Ninety-one thousand to a dealer in the next county for the combine, done in October of 2023 with a used one and a promise. Sixty-eight thousand owed on credit cards, which was a bad way to buy parts and which he had done because the parts could be got at nine at night and the parts were what made a man a man who fixed things. Thirty-one thousand to a lender in Fetterling whose name was not on any document Corrine had ever seen, which was Boone's business and which he declined to discuss. And a mechanic's lien on the frame of a truck, which was not in the notebook because it had been filed in April and he had not been able to write it down. He told her this in the kitchen, at the table, with the notebook closed, on the twenty-fourth of August, after two hours of her not asking. Loretta had gone to bed at eight and had not gone to bed at eight and had come back down at nine and had sat at the end of the table with her hands around a cup she had not drunk from. "Did you show her?" Boone said. "I showed her the report. I showed her the commission agenda. I have shown her nothing else and I am not going to show her the notebook, because you did not ask me to and because I am not your mother's bookkeeper." "I asked you what you know about the offer." "The offer is two-eighty flat across thirty-one acres. The offer is forty-eight on the crop ground if they take the whole quarter. Neither of those is real anymore and both of us know it." Corrine sat down across from him. "Tell me why you took the combine out in 2023 on a promise." "Because I had four thousand acres of custom work on paper in October and a used machine came up and I was tired of the rent, and the man sold it to me at a number that made me feel like a man again." He said it without any self-pity at all, which Corrine had always found harder to be in a room with than self-pity. "That's the truth of it and I'd say it again in front of the bank." "And then?" "Then corn came in at a hundred and ten on a Tuesday and the fertilizer came in on a Monday and I had two good years and one that was a disaster of exactly the size of the mistake before it, and I did the arithmetic wrong in the fall of 2024, because I did it in my head at a kitchen table instead of on a piece of paper, which is a thing you would have told me not to do if I had asked you, and I did not ask you." Corrine looked at her hands. "I've been angry with you since March," she said. "I've been angry at you in a specific way that I want you to know about, so that it stops being in the room. I've been angry because you came to me with a form and asked me to write a number that would sell our mother's field. And when you said that to me in the yard I heard the thing under it, which was that you had already asked somebody else and been told no." Boone's jaw worked. "I never said it was the only way." "You said it was the only way. You said a number is what makes the sale cheap. You said it in the yard." Corrine heard how flat her own voice had gone and made herself put some of it back. "You sat in the mud and told a stranger that my professional paper is the instrument of your debt, and you were right, and I have not been able to put that down since April." "It's true." "I know it's true. That's the part that has taken eight months." She leaned forward. "So let me put something on the table that isn't mine. In 1974 your father found a culvert and reported it as an inspection and never said another word about it for forty years, and in the third week of August 1998 the Hollow stood in water because a dead elm had plugged a pipe under a lane. That's in my file. That's in his file. That's in a piece of extension mail Ida Roegner has been keeping in a drawer since 1998. And in July I cut the pipe out and twenty acres came back, and I wrote it up honestly and it cost us the buyer." "So write it up dishonestly." "No. So here is what I want you to hear from me, and I'd say it if you had asked me and I would say it if we had a week." Corrine put her hands flat on the table the way Loretta did, and was aware as she did it of exactly where she had learned it. "The debt is real and it is yours and you did not inherit it from anybody at this table. You're twenty-nine years old and you have two hundred and ninety thousand dollars and no way to stand it up with a crop. The field cannot carry that. Nothing in this family can carry that. If I could find two hundred and ninety thousand dollars in a drawer I would put it on this table tonight and none of the rest of this would be happening." "I'm not asking you for money." "I know you're not, that's why I'm offering it and not asking for it." She took her hands back. "What I'm asking you for is a week where nobody from the county comes up that lane, and you and I go and get two opinions on what twenty acres of tile-drained silt loam at eleven miles from a paved road would actually cost a man who farms it, and whether there's a young man in this county who has a grandfather with two hundred thousand dollars of dirt under his shoes. And if the answer is that there isn't, then we go back to your number, and I'll write the letter that keeps the paper honest either way, and I'll do it for you." "Even though that kills the sale." "Especially then. Especially then," Corrine said. "Because if I only ever tell the truth when the truth pays us, then the piece of paper you called an instrument in April was never honest at all, it was just expensive." The kitchen was very quiet. Upstairs a floorboard took somebody's weight and let it go. Boone Ambrose sat with his hands flat on a closed notebook for about a minute and a half. "Sis," he said. "There's no young man in this county. I know every young man in this county and there isn't one, because I have tried to sell him custom work for eleven years and I can't sell him anything." "Then who?" "Which one." "Who's got two hundred thousand dollars and a reason to want the Hollow." He thought about it for a long time, and Corrine watched him arrive at it and watched him decide to keep it for a while. "There's one," he said. "And he's a pain in the ass about it, and he'll want it on paper, and you're going to have to be the one who explains it to him." ---