He looked at the code sections. He looked at her. "You're going to walk into that hearing better prepared than Dunar's lawyer." He said, "I'm going to walk in prepared." She said, "Garrett will do the talking, but I need to be in that room." "Why?" He said, "Not challenging, genuinely asking." Because Dunbar is betting I won't come, she said. He's betting the distance and the baby and the cost will keep me in a letter. He's betting I'll send Garrett and hope.
She looked at Amos. If I'm not there, I'm a name on a document. If I'm there, the commissioner sees me. He sees a woman who built a cabin and planted a garden and had a child on that land and is standing in his office in November with documentation and representation and no intention of going anywhere. She paused.
Dunar is counting on me being abstract. I am going to make sure I am not. Amos was quiet for a moment. Then I'll drive you. She started to answer and he said, "I have business in Durango.
There's a feed supplier I've been meaning to talk to for 3 months." She looked at him. He looked back with the expression of a man telling the truth while being aware that it sounds convenient. Amos, it's not invented, he said. Frank can tell you. I've been putting it off since August.
She held his eyes for a moment and then let it go because she was tired and the offer was practical and the hearing was 11 days away and she had better things to do with her argument than spend it on this. We leave the 12th, she said. I need to be there the day before. The 12th. He said the road to Durango in late October was not the road she had taken north in July.
The ground was frozen hard, the air sharp enough to cut breath. The San Juan peaks carrying snow down to elevations that had been green two months ago. Clara sat on the wagon seat beside Amos with young Henry bundled against her chest under her coat and watched the territory pass and thought about the first time she had taken this road in the other direction. The direction of the claim of the tool chest of a decision she wasn't sure she'd made correctly and how different the world had looked then enormous and indifferent and full of things she did not yet know how to do. They did not talk much the first day.
She was not a talker in transit and she had learned he wasn't either, which was a compatibility she had not expected to find useful and found more useful than she would have predicted. He drove and she watched the country and young Henry slept against her chest with the deep unconscious trust of someone who has not yet learned that the world is uncertain. The silence between the two adults had enough history in it to be easy, which was its own thing, different from comfortable, more particular than that. They camped where the road bent east near a stand of bare cottonwoods. Amos had the fire going before she had fully settled and coffee ready when she came back from seeing to young Henry.