On the drive home, Warren took the long route around the property. He passed the high fields, the machine shed, the old pecan trees near the farmhouse, and finally the eighty acres that had once seemed like the hole through which the entire farm would disappear.
A flock of ducks lifted from the water as the truck slowed.
Warren rolled down the window.
"You know what's annoying?"
Casey smiled. "Several things, usually."
"Gerald was right about one sentence."
"Which one?"
"Water did make me make a decision."
Casey looked toward the wetland.
Warren continued. "Just not the decision he wanted."
They parked at the edge and walked the perimeter.
By then the project had a formal name in agency documents, something long involving the watershed and restoration bank. Warren rarely used it. To him it remained the low eighty. Casey sometimes called it the wetland when she wanted to irritate him.
They stopped at the original measuring stake, weathered now and replaced by a permanent monitoring point.
"You remember the first mark?" Casey asked.
"Two feet of water and a dead soybean crop. Hard to forget."
"I remember thinking you were going to make me stop measuring because you were tired of hearing about birds."
"I was."
"What changed?"
Warren considered that.
"You kept bringing me facts after I told you what I wanted the facts to mean."
Casey looked at him.
"That's irritating," he added. "Useful, but irritating."
She laughed.
Warren leaned on the fence and watched wind move through the reeds. "Your grandmother used to do the same thing."
Casey had heard few comparisons to her grandmother that landed that deeply.
"She'd have liked this?"