“You hurt?” I asked. “What happened?”
“Burned myself,” he grunted. “Nothing serious.”
Nevertheless, he held his hand in the water another minute or two before pulling it out with the handkerchief dripping wet. I could see red around the edges on the palm of his hand, but he wouldn’t untie it to let me see just how bad it was.
“I told you. It only stings a little, okay?”
“Fine. So what were you and Sutterly talking about?” I asked, still suspicious of Sutterly’s motives and Adam’s meeting with him.
“Hey, back up there,” he said sharply. “This isn’t one of your courtrooms.”
The boots he wore were probably his, but the jeans were probably Zach’s. Certainly the maroon-and-green rugby shirt was Zach’s because I’d given it to him two Christmases ago. Makes cross-country packing easy if, at the other end, you can borrow from your twin’s wardrobe.
My brothers from Daddy’s first marriage tend to be big-boned and solid, and they top out between five ten and six one. Like Will and Zach, Adam stands about six three with the hard lean build of the men on Mother’s Stephenson side of the family. Unfortunately, I got the worst of the genetic blend: Daddy’s bones but the same volatile Stephenson temper as Mother and my three youngest brothers. We’re quick to anger, quick to tears, quick to forgive.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that Dick Sutterly makes me nervous the way he wants to slap a house on every square inch at this end of the county.”
But Adam wouldn’t let me off that easily. “What difference does it make to you? You live over in Dobbs. Not out here.”
“And because I don’t live here, I’m not supposed to care? Because you live in California, it doesn’t matter if you help wreck it for the others?”
“Get off my case,” he said angrily, striding away so abruptly that the dogs were torn between staying with me and trailing after him.
I almost had to run to keep up with his long legs. “What’s going on here, Adam? You’re the richest one of us all. How much money do you need, for God’s sake, that you’d sell Daddy out to Dick Sutterly and G. Hooks Talbert for a measly forty-five thousand?”
“Rich?” He turned on me with a snarl. “You people are sitting over here on seven million dollars’ worth of property in one of the most economically sound areas in the country and you call me rich?”
“Seven million?” I was stunned. “Who’s got seven million?”
“Doesn’t anybody ever do the simple arithmetic?” He shook his head in exasperation. “How many acres do you and Daddy and the boys own all together?”
“I don’t know. Two thousand? Maybe twenty-five hundred?”
“Be conservative. Say two thousand. And what’s it going for these days? Rock-bottom prices?”
“Thirty-five hundred an acre,” I hazarded.
I broke off a twig, stooped down, and did the multiplication in the dirt. The zeroes that lined up behind the seven astounded me. Adam was right. It had never occurred to me to do the math.
Daddy and most of the boys are farmers.
If you’re a farmer, you may cycle a lot of cash from one growing season to another. You go into debt to buy heavy equipment and you pay for expensive repairs. You buy fertilizer, pesticides, and disease-resistant seeds. Then you have to hire extra labor to plant and harvest. Money comes in, money goes out, but it’s hard to ever feel rich because so little of that money seems to cycle into your own pocket to stay. No sooner is the crop sold and your debt paid off than it’s time to borrow more and start all over again.
But if you’re a Knott and there’s a little extra cash lying around at the end of the year, you buy land. You don’t sell it. Except to each other, as Adam had sold to Zach and me what he’d inherited from Mother years ago before the prices started to soar.
I stood up and erased the numbers with my sneaker. It unsettled me just to think about it. Seven million dollars?
“Minimum,” said Adam. “So if you want to cough up that measly forty-five thousand, I’ll deed you my measly three acres and you can keep on being dewy-eyed and romantic about The Land as if it were a mystical entity and not negotiable property.”
“But why?” I asked again. “You and Karen aren’t having problems, are you?”
“Ever hear of downsizing?” he asked grimly.
I looked at him blankly. “You lost your job?”
Adam wouldn’t meet my eyes and suddenly I realized what had seemed different about him when he arrived Wednesday night. The surface sheen was still there, but underneath he was no longer the cocksure golden boy.
“What happened?”
“Same old same old. Crystal Micronics got bought out by Global V.I. last winter and since my seniority entitled me to a bigger benefits package than my G.V.I, counterpart, I was the one the bottom-liners cut loose in February.”
“You’ve been out of work since February? But with your skills and your experience—”
“Silicon Valley’s full of forty-year-old men with my skills and my experience. We’ve sold the boat and the Jags, let the maid and gardener go, and put the kids in public school this year. If it weren’t for Karen’s job, we’d have had to dump the house instead of selling it last week for a break-even price.”
“You sold your house?” Now I was distressed. I knew how much Karen loved that house. “Adam, why didn’t you tell us? Let us help?”
“And listen to Haywood and Robert and Andrew brag about bailing their uppity little brother out of his troubles? No, thanks. And don’t you go blabbing to them either, you hear?”
“They wouldn’t brag,” I said defensively.
“You know what I mean.”
We had reached the burned spot and I helped him kick wet sand onto the last smoldering coals.
“Hey, don’t look so gloomy. It’s going to be all right. Eventually. With what the house brought and with what I have left from my severance package, I’ve got almost enough to form a partnership with two other guys in my position. All three of us had been wanting to go out on our own for years, but the corporations made it too comfortable to leave. Now we’re going to start our own company. Dick Sutterly’s so hot for that three acres that I’m betting he’ll go sixty thousand. That would put me just over what I need for my third. Hell, if it works out, I could be back in a few years to buy you all out.”
The return of his arrogance infuriated me. “And in the meantime, Dick Sutterly sticks one of his cheap housing developments right there across the creek, but you don’t give a damn because you’ll be out in California while Daddy’s back here with his heart breaking. Street lamps lighting up his night sky, horns blowing, kids trashing his creek. The boys are right. You did get uppity and big-headed and you’ve turned your back on your own family.”
We were back to glaring at each other over the dogs’ heads.
“You ever give two thoughts about what this family’s like from where I stood?” said Adam. “Number ten son in a gang of eleven boys? But at least Zach and I were special because we were twins and we were the babies, right? And then seven years later, along came the darlin’ baby girl the family’d been praying for, for all those years, so suddenly Zach and I were just two more little interchangeable Knott boys.”
Quick tears flooded my eyes. “I didn’t realize you hated me.”
Ladybelle came to me instinctively and nuzzled my fingers.
“Oh hell, Deborah, I didn’t hate you. I’m just trying to make you understand why I had to get away, find some individuality. And now that I’ve got this chance for real independence, I’m not going to lose it. I don’t care what you or Karen or any of the boys think. One way or another, I’m going back to California next Wednesday with sixty thousand dollars in my pocket, okay?”