Chapter 17

The meeting with Wallace was on a Tuesday and it went the way her father had designed it to go, which was to say it went well without feeling easy.

Wallace sat across the table with his hands folded and listened to her walk through the grant structure, the tribal environmental office as grantee, the documented landowner partnership, the transparent reporting requirements, the federal oversight that made the conflict of interest argument not just weak but technically incoherent. She had prepared for it the way she prepared for everything, thoroughly and without rushing toward any conclusion, and she presented it the same way, fact by fact, letting the structure carry the argument.

Her father sat at the end of the table and said almost nothing.

When she finished Wallace was quiet for a long time. He looked at his folded hands and then at the window and then at her father and then back at her.

“The tribe benefits,” he said.

“Directly and documentably.”

“The landowner benefits.”

“Also directly and documentably. That’s what a partnership is.”

He looked at his hands again. “People are still talking.”

“People talked about my father and my mother for three years,” she said. “They found other things to talk about.”

Wallace looked up. She held his eyes and let him have the silence.

He looked at her father. “You’re comfortable with this.”

“I’m proud of this,” her father said. It was the first thing he’d said in forty minutes. He said it quietly and without emphasis and it landed in the room the way quiet things did when the person saying them meant every word.

Wallace unfolded his hands and placed them flat on the table and looked at the grant summary she’d put in front of him. He read it, actually read it, which she respected. He turned to the landowner partnership page and read that too.

Then he closed the folder.

“The annual report comes to the full council,” he said.

“That was always the plan.”

“I want a seat on the project advisory committee.”

She looked at him. He looked back, not combative, not conceding, just a man who needed to be part of something he’d been fighting so he could stop fighting it.

“Done,” she said.

He nodded once and stood and picked up his copy of the grant summary and left without ceremony.

Her father looked at the door for a moment after it closed. Then he looked at her with the expression that was both things at once, the chief and the father, satisfaction and something older underneath it.

“Your mother would have handled that the same way,” he said.

She drove back to the ranch in the cold October afternoon and found David in the barn doing the end of day feeding, moving down the row of stalls with the feed cart, each horse getting its measure without ceremony. She sat on a hay bale and told him about Wallace, the advisory committee seat, the folded hands, the reading of the document.

He listened without interrupting.

“Smart,” he said when she finished. “Giving him the seat.”