Warren read it in the morning and again after lunch. By supper he had memorized the important phrases, which did nothing to make them less frightening. A letter could be folded and placed in a drawer, but a date moved toward you whether you looked at it or not. For the first time, he wondered whether Gerald had been right about selling, not because Gerald understood the land, but because cash was real in a way that possibilities were not.
Casey found him in the machine shed after dark, sitting on the step of an old combine with the bank letter open on his knee. She had planned to tell him about a promising call from Miriam's office, but stopped when she saw the way he held the paper. He looked smaller than he had in the morning. The sight frightened her more than the letter itself.
"I made this place harder for you," Warren said before she could speak. "You've come home, and now you're spending your days trying to solve a problem I should have solved twenty years ago."
Casey climbed onto a low wooden pallet opposite him. "You didn't put that outlet upstream," she replied. "And I'm here because I want to be. Those are different things."
"You had a job waiting somewhere else."
"I had an offer," she said. "I haven't decided what I'm doing with it. I should probably tell you that."
Warren took off his hat and looked down at the rim. He had expected her to leave when the summer ended because that had been the plan she brought with her. The idea had hurt him, but he had accepted it as a fair exchange: she would help for a season, and he would not ask her to postpone her own life. Hearing that she was struggling with the decision made him realize his silence might be another kind of pressure.
"If you go, you go with my blessing," he said. "Don't stay because you think the bank gets to make both our decisions."
Casey stared at him. She had been bracing for an argument that never arrived. "I haven't decided to leave," she said again, and this time the words were not a defense but a statement of fact.
They sat in the shed while insects tapped against the overhead light. Warren told her about the first operating note he had signed after inheriting the land, how the sum had seemed enormous then, and how Martha had sat beside him at the kitchen table and insisted that fear was not always a reason to refuse a necessary risk. He explained that he had spent years borrowing to keep the farm alive, then years working to pay the borrowing down, and that he was exhausted by the idea of beginning the same cycle at seventy-four. Casey listened without telling him that everything would work out.