He did the arithmetic the same way she did in his head, arriving at a number and then checking it against additional factors before saying anything. "You're going to be close by September," he said. "I know." "If the draw exceeds the recharge rate--" "I know, Silas." He looked at the field.
He looked at the barrels lined up near the well by the families currently drawing. He said, "You told them they could draw as much as they needed." "I told them they could draw what they needed to live. That's what I said. It's not the same thing."
She stopped walking the row and looked at him. "I told Ruth Bell I'd have seed for them after harvest. I have three other families drawing from my well. If I start charging water rates or rationing grudgingly, I've become something different from what I'm trying to be."
"What are you trying to be?" She thought about it. Not because she didn't know, but because she wanted to say it right. "A neighbor. Just a neighbor who happened to have the right idea in April."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, "My ranch well is one hundred feet deeper than yours and hasn't dropped at all this season." She waited.
"I can run barrels of water by cart once a week from my well to here. Top off your supply. It won't solve the shortage for the whole valley, but it'll keep your draw levels stable through September." She opened her mouth.
"Before you say anything," he said, "this is not rescue. I am managing a resource I have toward a purpose I find worth managing it toward. You can tell me the arithmetic of why it helps, and I will not argue with you." She closed her mouth.
"Say the arithmetic," he said. She said it. His deeper well supply, her draw deficit, the number of families currently depending on her property for water, the yield she was protecting, the seed reserve she'd promised, the community's direct winter interest in whether her harvest survived to distribution. "So, it's worth it," she said.
"Yes, for the valley." "Yes," he said, "for the valley." They both understood there were other reasons inside the practical ones, and they both chose not to name those reasons yet because the timing was wrong and the work was not finished and naming something before it was ready never made the thing more real, only more fragile.
"All right," she said, "Wednesday deliveries. I'll keep the account." "I don't need an account." "I'm keeping one anyway." He didn't argue with the ledger.
He had learned enough about her by then to know which things weren't negotiable. The last week of August was the one that made the difference. Not the harvest that was still 2 weeks away, but the riders stopped at the fence line less frequently now, and when they stopped, it was not with the flat uninvested staring of people looking at someone else's luck. They were looking at something they had attached a meaning to. The meaning was complicated and not entirely comfortable because it contained the knowledge that Evie Mercer had been right and the rest of them had been wrong.