Raymond said he was feeling fine.
Pete said he would have been a lot angrier than that.
Raymond said being angry at someone for not knowing what they don't know was a lot of energy to spend on something that had already resolved itself.
Pete thought about that for a while and then said he guessed that was one way to look at it.
Raymond said it was the most practical way, and practical was generally how he tried to look at things. They went back to work.
On the third morning after the incident, when the trench was filled back in and the system was back online, and Raymond had run the pump for 2 hours to pressure check every section of the new line, he found a folded piece of paper tucked into the latch of his front gate. It was a handwritten note from a woman named Carol, who lived four houses into the subdivision and had apparently watched from her window on the morning the patrol cars had come.
The note said that she had read Donna's post and assumed, like everyone else, that the situation was what it had been described as. She said she should have looked into it before deciding. She said she was sorry. She said her late husband had grown up on a ranch in a different part of the state, and she knew from him what it meant to work land you cared about, and she thought Raymond deserved to hear that someone in the neighborhood understood that. The note was signed with her first name and her house number in case he ever wanted to say hello.
Raymond read it twice, standing at the gate in the early morning light. He folded it back up and put it in his shirt pocket. That afternoon, he drove his truck to the bakery in town and bought a loaf of the sourdough bread that the woman there made on Thursdays, and he dropped it off at the address written on the note. He left it on the porch without knocking. He did not want to make a production of it, and he drove home and checked the pressure gauges one more time, which read exactly what they should, and then went inside and made a cup of coffee.