Joan called that evening. Warren almost let it go to voicemail but answered because Casey was sitting across from him with the look she used when she wanted him to do something he had already decided not to do. His daughter listened through the account of the flooding and the bank's offer, asking practical questions about the operating note and whether the insurance claim had been filed. Then she asked why he had not called her sooner.
"Because I knew what you'd say," Warren replied. "You'd tell me to sell while I still have something left to sell."
"I was going to tell you to call a lawyer," Joan said. "But you've managed to make that difficult before I've even started."
Warren stared at the wall. Joan had inherited Martha's dry humor and Warren's stubbornness, a combination that had complicated family dinners for as long as he could remember. She loved the farm, but she had never believed that loving it required spending every possible year trying to keep the entire six hundred acres under one person's control. Warren knew that difference between them was honest, and perhaps that was why he found it so hard to hear.
"The land isn't a museum, Dad," Joan said more gently. "You're allowed to change how you use it. You're also allowed to get help when someone else changes it without asking."
He glanced at Casey, who suddenly seemed very interested in a stain on the tabletop. "I've got help," he said. Joan told him she was glad, and the warmth in her voice made him look away. When he hung up, Casey said nothing about the call. She only added an appointment with a local attorney to the list on the refrigerator.
The lower acres had been a source of family arguments long before they became a lake. Warren's father, Silas, had bought the first hundred and sixty acres with the proceeds from a partnership dissolved badly and a loan secured against the machinery he already owned. He believed so fiercely in dry, productive ground that he talked about drainage ditches the way other men talked about church. After every storm, he walked the bottom fields checking where the water stood, and young Warren learned to measure his father's mood by the depth of mud on his boots.
Silas had been proud of reclaiming the low ground, though nobody had used the word reclaiming in those days. They had simply said they had made it farmable, pushing narrow channels through the wetter areas and adding tiles wherever the budget allowed. Before the ditches, old family photographs showed a patchwork of reeds and shallow pools where ducks gathered in autumn. Warren remembered those pictures mostly because Silas had held them up as proof of what hard work could improve.