The lawyer in Billings gave me a map with a pencil circle on it, and even so I miss the turn twice. Whispering Pines Ranch is forty minutes of dirt road past the last fence, and my hire car is the wrong colour for all of it. I am Ida, twenty-nine, I run a gallery in Hamburg, and yesterday I found out my grandfather left me half of a place I have never seen.
The other half is leaning on the corral fence when I pull up.
Cole is exactly what the word foreman implies: hat, dust, forearms, a face that has decided about me before I've opened the door. He doesn't come over. He lets me walk to him in shoes that were a mistake.
“You're the granddaughter.”
“I'm Ida.” I hold out my hand. He looks at it, then shakes it, once, briefly, as if he's checking whether I'll flinch at the calluses. I don't. My grandmother was a sculptor. I know what working hands feel like.
“Your grandfather said you'd come to sell,” he says. “I told him you'd come to look first. One of us owes the other a beer.” He straightens. “You can't sell without me. I'm not signing. So you can look all you want.”
The house behind him has a porch that sags on the left and a window someone has recently repaired. Beyond it, the land runs out to a line of dark pines and a sky that makes Hamburg feel like a closet. Cole watches me look, and I see him see it, the second when the place gets its hooks into me, and he doesn't gloat. He just tips his head toward the barn and says, “There's a horse needs feeding. You coming?” It isn't a welcome. But it's not a refusal, either, and I have exactly one pair of shoes to ruin.
