"The development group has expressed interest, yes. But I don't want you to think of that as pressure. Think of it as an option."
"An option arrives before the water," Warren said. "This sounds more like a bill for something somebody else ordered."
Gerald's smile thinned. He reminded Warren that the bank had obligations to depositors and lending partners, that loan decisions required current cash flow, and that agricultural businesses could not escape the arithmetic of seasons. His tone remained polite through every sentence. It was that politeness Warren remembered afterward, the smooth confidence of a man who spoke as if the problem were unfortunate but inevitable.
Before leaving, Gerald said something that Warren wrote down on the back of the morning's feed receipt. "You don't have to keep fighting the water forever. Sometimes water makes decisions for people who refuse to make them for themselves." Then he climbed into the truck and drove back down the lane, leaving Warren staring at an acreage the bank was apparently ready to buy before anyone had determined why it was flooded.
Casey found the receipt later on the kitchen counter. She read Gerald's words, turned it over, and wrote the date beneath them. When Warren asked why, she said that people could forget the precise words that had been spoken after enough months of arguing about them. He told her he would remember every syllable. She told him memory and evidence were two different things.
That night, Warren tried to telephone his daughter Joan, Casey's mother, who lived several hours away and had spent years warning him that the farm was consuming more of his life than it returned. He hung up before the call connected, suddenly unable to bear another conversation about whether he should sell. Instead he went to the barn, checked machinery that did not need checking, and sat on an overturned bucket until the light fell away. For the first time since Martha died, he found himself wishing someone else would decide what came next.
The following morning, Casey appeared beside him carrying a notebook she had bought at a discount store. On the cover she had written Puit Lower Ground, Spring Observations in careful black letters. Inside were four columns marked date, water depth, entry flow, and notes. She placed the notebook on the hood of his truck and showed him the first readings.
"You don't have to help," she said. "But if they keep telling us it was weather, I'd rather have numbers than opinions."
Warren looked at the flooded field, then at his granddaughter. He had spent his life teaching people younger than him how to measure seed rates, set a planter, and keep a straight line through a long field. Now she was asking him to learn a different kind of measuring, and he did not like how much he needed her to be right. He reached for the notebook anyway and asked which post she wanted him to use as the first marker.