I had already hired a crew qualified to work on the tank. They rigged their equipment from the catwalk ninety-six feet up and spent two cold days preparing the surface and laying down fresh gray and white paint. I did not climb after them. At fifty-four, I had learned to appreciate the difference between knowing how a job should be done and needing to prove I could do it myself. I stood below with coffee and watched the letters emerge, stroke by stroke, until WILSON was readable from the county road again.
Under the name the painters put 1958 in the same block style my grandfather had used. I had considered adding a new date, perhaps the year the court confirmed the boundary or the year the service agreement was rewritten. In the end I asked them to leave the original date alone. The tower had not become ours again that year. It had remained ours through all the years when people tried to make us believe otherwise.
Leah photographed the finished tank from the shoulder of the county road, carefully keeping the farm gate and the old sycamore tree in the frame. She showed me the image on her camera screen and asked whether I wanted it printed large enough to hang in the kitchen. I said I did. Anna said she wanted a copy for the bedroom, too, which was the closest either of us came to admitting how frightened we had been of losing the place.
That evening we ate together without a phone on the table. It was the first family supper in months when I did not interrupt the conversation to answer an emergency call or correct somebody's misunderstanding online. Leah told us about a professor who insisted students verify every claim against the original source, and Anna laughed that our daughter had evidently found a teacher after her father's heart. I told them I was glad someone else was reminding her, because she had spent enough of her childhood hearing it from me.
After supper Leah asked whether I regretted refusing Diane's purchase offer. I thought about the debt, the legal bills, the nights delivering water, the threat to my certification, and the fear I had heard in my daughter's voice. I could not pretend those costs had been small. "I regret not seeing the danger sooner," I said.
"I regret being late with the report. I regret making your mother carry so much of the worry. But I don't regret telling someone they can't promise water the well doesn't have."
Leah nodded, then asked whether I thought the neighbors would ever trust us the way they once had. I told her trust was not a switch that could be turned on after a court ruling. Some people would remember the crisis and associate the old tower with fear. Others would remember the warning that kept them from using contaminated water, and a few would never forgive being asked to admit they had misjudged me. I could live with that if the system was safe and people knew where to find the truth.