answer, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. It got so quiet at our table that you could hear the clink of knives and forks all around us. “Adam and Eve on a raft,” Dee called to the grill cook, one of her customers having eggs for early supper.
Finally Mr. Bally said, “You must know there are two ways this can go. There’s the easy way, and there’s the hard way.”
“The easy way.”
“The homeowners are offered a fair market price for their properties as well as compensated for the cost of relocation.”
“The hard way.”
Mr. Bally leaned back and didn’t say anything. He made his fingers into a little steeple. He had a tie clip with the state seal on it, and an old Timex watch, and a wedding band. He looked like he felt sorry for me, which made me angry. Plus I felt like he was using me somehow to get what he wanted. That made me angrier.
“You know what I’ve noticed about you, Mr. Bally? You have two different voices. You have the voice you’re using with me here, and then you have the voice you use when you come out to the valley.” It was true: when he was talking to the men at the diner, or arguing with Donald’s grandfather, or talking to Mr. Langer, Mr. Bally used a kind of folksy voice and vocabulary. It seemed practiced, and natural, and I wondered whether it was because that was the voice he’d grown up with and this, here, all business, was the voice he’d grown into.
“So do you, young lady. You just haven’t noticed it yet.” He stirred sugar into his coffee. “Someone from the valley who understood the process and the science behind it could be extremely helpful to me and to the state water board in terms of bringing others around to a reasonable point of view. Do you have any thoughts about your plans after graduation?”
“They’re holding a spot here for me at the diner,” I said.
“Very funny.”
“Are you offering me a job, Mr. Bally?”
“Would you like one? I know you’re planning on college, but we could give you a job for the summer. It would be a lot more interesting than waiting tables. And state employees get a break on tuition at the university.”
“A job flooding my family’s farm?”
“That’s going to happen one way or another, Miss Miller,” Mr. Bally said. “The easy way or the hard way. Why don’t you discuss my offer with your mother?” He put a ten-dollar bill on the table, then put his coffee cup on top of it. “You still didn’t answer my question,” he said. “What was the biggest mistake they made in the original dam project? I know you know the answer.”
I sat there saying nothing, watched him pick a mint out of the bowl at the register and walk out the double glass doors. “Too smart for your own good,” Ruth said about me sometimes when she was irritated, and I felt that way then.
There was something I wanted to say to Winston Bally, and the simple fact was I hadn’t had the guts. One afternoon near the end of summer I had spent three hours on the banks of the river, waving off the gnats with a hand in front of my face, thinking about what I’d do if I were the engineer, the manager, the person calling the shots on Miller’s Valley. The dam was big, bigger than it needed to be. The reservoir was big, too, but not as big as it could be or maybe ought to be. The air was as thick and still as tapioca, and I felt like I might as well be the only person in the world, it was so deserted and silent except for the sound of rushing water and the occasional bullfrog thump. Until I followed Miller’s Creek pretty far in and broke through a thick line of trees, there was no sign of anything human or even alive, and then not much of one until I’d hiked so far that I could almost see our place down below. Which was the point, I guess, as far as the government people were concerned, so few people who needed to be moved to do what needed to be done.
I’d gotten to a spot on the creek where I used to build dams myself, as a kid, and I’d stood and stared at it for a long time. As wide as that