"Sure," Wade said. "I know how it is."
He knew about the certificate. When Claire's mother, Helen Danner, passed four years ago in Lewistown, she had left Claire a little under eleven thousand dollars, and Claire had put it into a CD and told him it was June's college money and nobody was to touch it, not for a dry year, not for a broken baler, not for anything. He had agreed. It was the only money on the whole place that was not, in some sense, the ranch's.
He thanked Dan and shook his hand again and walked back out through the heavy glass doors into the bright cold, and he sat in his pickup on Main Street with the engine running and the heater blowing on his feet.
She had cashed in June's money in July. She had started keeping a ledger in July. A man named D, or a boy named D, owed her seven thousand five hundred dollars, or she owed him, and he came when Wade was gone and he ate at Wade's table and June loved him, and she had told June to keep it a secret. And she would not say his name, because she said that if she said his name, Wade would do something he could not take back.
He tried to imagine a name that would make him do that. He found that he could imagine several.
He took the long way home, the gravel road that cut north of the highway across the benchland and came down onto Flatwillow Creek from above, because he wanted the time, and because it took him past the north pasture.
He still called it the Ferris place in his head, though it had been his for three years. Two sections of good grass and a hay meadow along the creek, a set of corrals, a house with the windows boarded now and the porch sagging. Ray Ferris's grandfather had homesteaded it about the same year Wade's great-grandfather had homesteaded the Hollister place four miles south, and for most of a century the two families had traded work at brandings and pulled each other's trucks out of the mud and sat on opposite sides of the aisle at the Grass Range Lutheran church. Then the bad years had come one on top of another, drought and the cattle market crash and Ray's back surgery and whatever else had happened inside that house that nobody talked about, and in the spring three years ago the bank in Roundup had foreclosed, and the land had been sold on the courthouse steps in Lewistown on a windy Tuesday morning.
Wade had bought it. There had been three bidders, and he had been the last one standing, and he had gotten it for less than it was worth, because land sold that way always went for less than it was worth. Everybody said it was a good buy. His father, if he'd been alive, would have said so too. It had doubled his grass. It had also doubled his debt, which was why Dan Albright did not like the look of his books going into winter.