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another site. They’ve also got their eye on our Big Dipper property near Boerne.”
    “I don’t know,” I said slowly.
    “Tommie, you need to leave some of these early decisions to me. We’ve got a good lease going with them.”
    “Is there any controversy over the farm so far? The seventy-five turbines already in place?” I’d stood on our land just once since the turbines had been erected. I’d had mixed feelings. Nestled near an old farmhouse, they had a strange beauty about them, rising higher than the Statue of Liberty, gently whirring and spinning with the wind, turning the plains into an eerie, alien landscape when night fell, their red eyes blinking.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Exactly what I asked. A year ago Daddy put in seventy-five turbines on this land with an option for more. Do you think it has gone smoothly?”
    Wade looked surprised that I had this much information. Or maybe surprised that I cared at all.
    I’d never liked Wade much. He was brusque, always around, quick to shoo us away from Daddy when we were little. But Wade and Daddy once walked into bad situations with nothing but each other and a gun. Shared violence is like human superglue.
    He decided to answer my question. “The rancher to the north makes a lot of noise to the media about the way it looks,” he drawled. “Says the turbines destroy his view. The town’s happy about the taxes improving their school system. They got a turf field out of the deal.”
    “I told Daddy a few months ago that the turbines are bothering the kids,” I said. “And the horses.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “They put up a wind farm near the rehabilitative ranch where I work. We can’t see the turbines, but they’re close enough for the kids to hear. They call them the whispering monsters. The horses don’t sleep as well. Some of the kids deal with constant nausea since they went full power. Wind turbine syndrome, they call it.”
    Wade frowned. “I can’t deal with this damn hippie crap right now, Tommie. This is what your father wanted. You keep dawdling and we’ll lose two million dollars like
this
.” He snapped his fingers, leaning over the desk, a little too near my face. “You can’t decide based on a few courses in psychology and a bunch of cancer kids and gimps and four-legged animals. That ain’t how you make business decisions.”
    He used
ain’t
to underscore his irritation, since we both knew Wade was a literate cowboy with a master’s in agribusiness from Texas A&M. But in his mind, the only kind of satisfactory therapy involved a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle whiskey and an hour to kill with a gun and a bull’s-eye.
    “The Big Dipper is a beautiful piece of land,” I told him. I bit back that I was finally only a couple of months from my Ph.D. “Untouched. There aren’t that many properties with natural running water from streams and the river.”
    “It’s recreational property,” Wade countered. “People aren’t paying for it anymore, not a prime piece like this.”
    We’d never sell that piece. I stared at him steadily. He was deliberately missing my point. I was deliberately missing his.
    Grief for Daddy poured out of both of us, seeping into the cracks in the floorboards where blood used to run.
    I knew that Wade fished with his twenty-five-year-old autistic son every Saturday, a promise he never broke. Wade’s cowboy boots were custom-made at Leddy’s down the street because of alimp that he’d never talk about. With that limp, he insisted on carrying my mother out of the house the day she left it for good, a rag doll in his arms.
    He was mostly a good man, a smart man. I knew it. I just didn’t like him.
    “Get out,” I said, because I didn’t want him to see me cry.
    “Yes, ma’am. Call when you need me. It’s going to be sooner than you think.” He gestured to the wooden file cabinets that lined the walls, to the mail stacking up on the desk, to the Apple computer that had