The county office kept its cold like a grudge. Joey came in off the noon street, where the asphalt had gone soft under her boots, and the air hit her like the door of a meat locker. The unit over the entrance had been groaning since before she was born. It groaned now, steady and wet, and the room under it sat fifteen degrees too cold for anybody dressed for a Texas afternoon.
Five members of the Hyles County Water Board sat behind a folding table at the front. Somebody had draped it with a felt runner to make it look like a bench. It still looked like a folding table.
Gideon was already there.
He sat on the near side of the aisle, hat resting crown-down on his knee, and he watched her come in the way he watched everything, without hurry. She took the chair across the aisle and one row up, close enough for business, far enough that she'd have to turn to look at him. She set her hands flat on her thighs. Her fingers curled at the edge of nothing, hunting the brim she'd left on the truck seat.
The chairman cleared his throat and read the notice aloud, though every soul in the room could have recited it. Cooperative agreement. All adjacent rights holders on the spring. Registered with the county by the deadline.
Then he turned a page and said the part she hadn't braced for.
"Registration won't go through on signatures alone," he said. "The board needs a repair plan on file for the shared structure. Scope of work, cost, who does what. No plan, no cooperative. No cooperative by October first, and the senior priority on that spring goes to open bidding."
Joey held her face flat. Inside, the arithmetic rearranged itself and came out worse.
She'd driven in thinking her signature was the wall. It wasn't. Her name meant nothing standing by itself. It needed every other name on the spring beside it, and it needed a plan for a gate that hadn't turned right in eleven years, and she owned exactly half the ground that touched it. The other half sat across the aisle with a hat on his knee.
"If I could say a word." A dry voice from two rows back.
The chairman nodded. Earl Dunning got halfway to his feet, thought better of it, and settled back. He ran a little pasture up above the bend, the highest patch of ground on the draw, and he'd been on this water longer than anyone else in the building.
"I'm for it," Earl said. "Whatever it takes. My granddad hauled buckets before there was a gate at all, and I'd rather not go back to buckets at seventy-one." A couple of the members smiled. "Put me down for a signature. And tell me when there's shovels. I still swing one."
"Noted, Earl. Thank you."
Earl folded his hands over the head of his cane and looked pleased to have helped.
"Which brings us to the two of you." The chairman looked between them. "You're the holders on the line. The structure sits on your boundary. Board wants your read on what it needs before anybody drafts a plan."
Joey spoke first, because the waiting felt worse than the talking.
"The winch is seized. Chain gives four inches and stops. Crossbeam's rotted through, and the hinge pins are more rust than pin. It needs a new beam milled to the old dimensions, new pins, and somebody up to the shoulders in silt to clear the channel. It won't swing till that's done."
"Marsh?"
Gideon took his time. His eyes went off to the side and down, the way they did when he was setting a thing in order before he'd let it out, and the pause stretched long enough that the woman on the end of the table shifted in her seat.
"Beam I can mill," he said. "Got the timber and the saw. Pins I can turn or buy. The dig's two people, minimum, and a day at least in this heat." He waited a beat. "She's right about the channel. Nothing turns till it's clear."
She's right. Two words, flat as the table between them. Joey watched him say it and told herself she felt nothing, and her thumb was already pressed hard into the meat of her palm before she knew she'd made a fist.
The chairman made a note. "Then here's the board's direction. Before the next session, the two of you walk the structure together and bring back a plan we can register. Joint inspection, both holders present." He glanced at a calendar taped to the wall. "Sooner beats later, with the date what it is."
"Tomorrow," Gideon said. "One o'clock. I'll be there either way."
Every face at the table turned to her.
"One o'clock," she heard herself say. Her voice came out even. It had no business coming out even.
Tomorrow at one she'd be standing in that channel. With him, on the line, boots in the cut where the water had closed over his brother, and there would be no gate between them to hold on to, because the gate was the whole reason they were going.
The chairman said something about a follow-up session in three weeks and the paperwork the clerk would start. Joey caught the words and lost them. She was already outside in her head, already down at the boundary, already turning the seized chain in her fist with him standing a length away.
Outside for real, the heat came back like an open oven. The dust hung in the still air as it had all summer, going nowhere without a wind to carry it.
Their two trucks sat nose to nose along the curb, his and hers, both of them known to every soul in Larkspur by the dents alone. A woman coming out of the post office slowed on the walk. She looked at Joey, then at Gideon, then back again, and let the look sit a beat too long before she carried on to her car.
Joey felt it land. In a town this size a thing didn't have to be true to be a story. The two of them at the county office on the same afternoon, standing at their trucks in the sun. It would be at Patsy's by supper, carried in on somebody's iced tea, and it would grow legs on the way.
Gideon pulled his hat down against the glare.
"One o'clock," he said again, like he thought she might talk herself out of it overnight.
"I heard you the first time."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth and quit before it got anywhere. He touched the brim and turned for his truck.
She got in first and had the engine going before he reached his door. The cab had baked the whole meeting through. She cranked the window down and pulled out onto the street, past the drugstore, past Patsy's with the blinds half drawn against the afternoon, and pointed the truck south toward home.
Eight miles of gravel lay between the town and the boundary. She'd drive it tomorrow at a quarter to one with a shovel rattling in the bed and no earthly way around what waited at the far end.
The gate. Harold Marsh's nail driven into the cypress eleven years back, the bark swollen up around its head now so only a rust-blistered lip still showed. The creek crawling past it far below, sunk so deep beneath the mark that a man could stand in the channel and reach up and never touch iron.
One o'clock, and the two of them down in the cut together, where the water had taken Cole Marsh, and not one inch of the line left between them to hold.