24
Once I knewwhat needed to be done, I called my mother and told her the plan, and she called every realtor she knew, and all of them sprang into action. Not exactly surprising, their enthusiasm: we were dream clients. A wealthy young couple interested in finding a lot—and I mean alot, I said to my mother, and my mother repeated to them—of land.
The listings flooded in. The property we would eventually buy arrived in my inbox on the very first day.
It was an old cattle ranch that had fallen into disrepair. Five hundred acres, set in the rolling hills between two mountain ranges in the southwest region of Idaho. There were old-growth forests and sprawling pastures, a hundred-year-old apple orchard, a series of creeks that crisscrossed through the acreage, and about a thousand feet of frontage to the most trout-plentiful river in the state. The land was veined with old fences and man-made trails, even nineteenth-century stone walls in some sections. It sat at the end of a long dirt road, several miles in length, surrounded by reservation land.
By the time I found the listing, there were already multiple active bids on the property. At the encouragement of my realtor, I called the owner to plead my case. He was an old man who was moving to a retirement home. His only son—a banker who lived in Sun Valley—had planned to take over the property and had accordinglydone some major renovations on the main house in preparation, but had died several months earlier. Pancreatic cancer. A total shock. This was the information I was given in the first minute of speaking to the man, and already I was desperate to get off the phone. There was nothing that made me more uncomfortable than sudden access to the painful sentiment of a stranger.
“It’s real wilderness out here,” he said. “Gets so quiet at night that your ears start to invent sounds. Crickets and the like. That’s on the nights when the wolves don’t howl.” He paused. “You ever hear a wolf howl?”
“Notpersonally,no, but—” I was hiding in the darkness of the foyer coat closet. “We’re quiet souls, my husband and me. We spent some time in the city, but it’s not for us.” There was a rustling beyond the door and I froze. Amelia’s drunken humming carried closer, and then I heard her open the coat closet on the opposite side of the foyer.
“Hello?” the old man said gruffly. “You still there?”
“Yes,” I whispered, covering my mouth with my hand against the receiver. “Just one sec—”
There was a rustling of hangers, a clanging sound, a rattle-clatter, a “whoopsie!” and then the whisper-click of a prescription bottle being picked up off the floor. (“Hello? Did I lose you? Hello?”) Then the humming carried down the hallway until a door shut and it was silent again. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Yes! Hi! I’m here. Listen, sir: We want to give our children a true American childhood. And my husband is a natural at farming!”
“Well,” the old man said. “That’s nice. My son—well. He was a natural, too.”
The man cleared his throat wetly, giving sudden sound to his grief. A long silence unspooled itself. Anxiety took hold of me. “We have big plans, sir,” I said quickly. “We’re going to revive your cattle farm.”
“That’s nice,” he said again. “But you know, farming’s hard work.”
“Absolutely. Absolutely it is.”
“The margins were never great, and they’re getting worse every year.”
I nodded vigorously to no one. “Such a shame.”
“I don’t mean to make any assumptions, ma’am, I just mean to say—” He paused here. “I know it’s trendy, now, for young people to fancy themselves farmers. And I just—well, I wouldn’t want you to bite off more than you can chew.”
Trendy.I nearly sputtered at the word. “Thank you so much for the concern—but with all due respect, sir: my husband and I are nothing like the young people you know.”
Not long after the phone call ended, my realtor texted me.He’s going to go with someone elsenot to worry, we will find something better!
I texted her back and told her to make one last final offer.
Go over ask by half a million dollars
I imagined the old man sitting in his kitchen, reading the number on his phone. I hoped he felt happy. I also hoped he felt—just a little bit—defeated.
Later that evening, my realtor texted me the happy news. I stared at the message on my phone for several minutes, then set my phone down on the counter and walked down the long hallway to Doug’s office. I knocked on the door, and Doug hollered immediately, “Come in.”
Doug’s office was a fever dream of 1950s manhood: the walls were dotted with diplomas and pictures with famous people, there were two leather chairs positioned in front of a fireplace with a cigar box sitting between them, and he, at this moment, was sitting behind a mahogany desk so large and ornate that it must have taken three or four men to get it in here.
“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing at the chair in front of the desk. As I was lowering myself into the seat, he said, “I just paid a consulting firm a hundred thousand dollars for them to tell me I’m old.”He barked out a laugh. “I’m fifty-five! In the prime of my life! But apparently, according to them, I am, and I’ll quote them here”—he rustled through a loose stack of papers on his desk, pulling out the one he needed—“ ‘rapidly falling out of favor with a number of core demographics.’ ”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was only vaguely aware of Doug’s politics to begin with.God, family, and beer. A traditional values man!I thought of Reena, who had spent the summer interning as a consultant, and wondered if it was her firm that had done the audit on Doug’s electability. Surely she would have relished that work. “Is it your—policies?”
Doug’s eyes flashed to me, and I knew I’d overstepped. “It’s never about the policies,” he said sharply. “A good politician doesn’t change his policies. Only the messaging.”
“Right,” I said immediately. “Of course. Well, you obviously are the expert. I’m just a housewife.” It was the first time I’d said that word aloud in reference to myself, and now I felt a not unpleasant reorganizing sensation in my body, almost like I was face down on a chiropractor’s table, feeling my spine crack gradually into a strange and new, if technically correct, alignment. A pain that promised to give way to relief.
“Well,” Doug said. Thehousewifecomment had clearly mollified him. “No need to solve the questions of my political career today. What can I help you with, Natalie?”
I took a deep breath, then said exactly what I had rehearsed. “I found a solution for Caleb. Not just a short-term one, either, but something permanent. Something life-altering.”
