I was sitting right there in a folding chair that smelled faintly of old floor wax when Leo slammed his empty cell phone down on the blotter and pretended he was still arguing about jurisdiction.

The office had been a dry cleaner’s three months before. You could still smell the perc solvent in the baseboards if the humidity got high enough. Leo had three law books on a cinder-block shelf and a stack of yellow legal pads that looked like he bought them at the gas station just to take up space.

I had sixteen thousand dollars left from the settlement my brother left behind after the tractor rollover, and I needed someone who didn’t charge three hundred an hour just to look at a title deed.

Leo didn’t look like a lawyer. He looked like an insurance adjuster who had lost his license and his hair in the same year. He had these small, darting eyes that never quite settled on my forehead, always flicking down to my boots or out the front window where the grain trucks rattled past toward the elevator.

“They think they can push us around,” Leo muttered, picking up a Bic pen and clicking it four times in a row. “Just because we’re out here in the county doesn’t mean we don’t know the rules of discovery. You tell their senior partner I want the deposition on my desk by noon tomorrow or I’m filing for sanctions.”

He hit the end button on the black plastic phone and tossed it onto a stack of unread advance sheets. He didn’t look at me for five seconds, letting the silence settle like dust on a gravel road.

“Sorry about that,” he said, and his voice dropped an octave into that greasy courtroom register he must have practiced in front of his bathroom mirror. “Big docket today. Between the probate court in Hastings and the class action down in Lincoln, my secretary barely has time to clear the fax machine. Now. What brings you into the firm today, Arthur?”

I knew it was theater. I’d spent twenty-four years running the parts counter at the Implement Works, and I knew the sound of a man who was selling something he didn’t have in the back room. You don’t get that many clicks out of a phone that isn’t on a dead battery.

But I didn’t care. I was sixty-four years old, my knees felt like gravel every time I climbed the stairs to my second-floor apartment, and the county was about to put a tax lien on the small strip of timber behind my sister’s place.

“It’s not a class action,” I said. I set my briefcase on his desk. It was an old canvas zip bag with the zipper broken on one corner, held together by a piece of green baling twine. “It’s just forty acres and a ditch that the railroad has been treating like a siding since nineteen eighty-two.”

Leo leaned back so hard the springs in his swivel chair groaned like an overloaded truck on a muddy grade. He laced his fingers across his stomach, right over a grease spot on his tie that looked like bacon fat from the diner down the block.

“Railroad cases are my bread and butter,” he said, and he didn’t even blink. “Union Pacific or Burlington Northern?

Doesn’t matter to me. They got deep pockets and they’re careless with the right-of-way leases. We can tie them up in district court for eighteen months before they even offer a settlement conference.”

“It’s the short line,” I told him. “The one that runs down to the grain elevator. They put a spur across the north corner without filing the easement.”

“An unrecorded easement,” Leo said, nodding like he was listening to a Supreme Court argument. “That’s textbook conversion of real property. We’re looking at treble damages if we push the nuisance angle.”

He didn’t ask to see the deed. He didn’t ask to see the tax receipts I had folded into a yellow manila envelope in my lap. He just reached into his drawer and pulled out a standard retainer agreement with the blanks already filled in by hand in blue ink that was still slightly tacky to the touch.

“My standard retainer for land recovery is two thousand five hundred,” he said, and his voice went soft and reasonable, like a preacher asking for the building fund. “That covers the initial filing fee, the surveyor’s affidavit, and my time down at the courthouse digging through the tract books. You want this resolved before the spring planting, don’t you?”

The way he said *spring planting* made my stomach turn over. I hadn’t farmed an acre since my wife passed away six years ago, and Leo knew it. Everybody in town knew I sold the combine to pay off the hospital bill at Mary Lanning. I was just trying to clear the title so my nephew could build a small pole barn for his welding tools without the county assessor coming out with a tape measure every three weeks.

“I brought fifteen hundred,” I said. “That’s what’s in the envelope.”

Leo looked at the envelope like it was a dead rat on his desk. His face didn’t change color, but his thumb started rubbing against his forefinger in that fast, nervous rhythm people use when they’re counting out poker chips.

“Fifteen’s a little tight for a federal question,” he murmured, squinting at the wall behind my left ear as if he were calculating billable hours in his head. “Federal court filings aren’t cheap. The clerk wants cash or a certified cashier’s check. No personal paper.”

“It’s cash,” I said. “Every bill came out of the ATM at the cooperative bank twenty minutes ago.”

The word *cash* seemed to clear the air better than an open window. Leo’s hand stopped moving. He leaned forward, put both elbows on the scarred mahogany laminate, and looked right into my eyes with a expression that almost looked like honesty if you didn’t look at the corners of his mouth.

“Let me see it,” he said.

I slid the manila envelope across the desk. He didn’t open it from the top; he tore the side open with his thumb like he was opening a pack of cheap cigarettes, pulled the banded stack out, and flipped through the fifties with a thumb that had tobacco stains under the nail. He didn’t count them. He just weighed the thickness in his hand for a second, then dropped the whole bundle into the bottom drawer of his desk alongside a half-empty box of saltines and a tube of denture adhesive.

“We’ll file the praecipe tomorrow morning before the nine o’clock docket,” he said, pulling the retainer agreement toward him and sliding a pen across the blotter. “Sign right there on the X. And Arthur? Don’t talk to the railroad agents if they come sniffing around. They like to settle cheap before the summons gets served.”

I signed my name. My hand was shaking slightly, not because I was scared of the railroad, but because my fingers always cramped up when the wind came out of the north off the Platte.

“What’s your name again?” I asked, looking at the brass nameplate on his desk. It was blank on both sides, the black paint still fresh and smelling like a hardware store shelf.

“Leo Vance,” he said, not looking up as he folded the agreement in half and shoved it into a gray filing folder that didn’t have a label on the tab. “Vance and Associates. We used to be down in Omaha, but the rent got too high for the kind of volume we handle.”

“Omaha,” I said.

“High-rises,” he added, waving a hand toward the ceiling where a water stain from the old dry cleaner’s boiler was spreading like a brown leaf. “Too much overhead. Out here you can actually breathe. Now, I got a deposition with the county commissioner in twenty minutes, Arthur. My girl will call you when the summons comes back from the sheriff’s office.”

I stood up and pulled my coat around my neck. The wind was hitting the plate glass window outside, making the frame rattle in its old putty.

“The sheriff’s office is closed on Tuesdays,” I said.

Leo didn’t miss a beat. He was already reaching for the dead phone again, his finger hovering over the buttons.

“That’s for the public counter,” he said without looking up. “I deal with the undersheriff directly. Go on now. Let me handle the paperwork.”

I walked out into the cold afternoon air. The sidewalk was greasy with coal smoke from the laundry down the block, and my boots made a wet, sucking sound against the cracked concrete as I crossed Fourth Street.

I didn’t go straight home. I walked down the alley behind the barbershop and sat on an upturned milk crate behind the grain elevator to watch the loading dock. After about twenty minutes, I saw Leo come out the side door of his office carrying a brown paper sack from the grocery store. He wasn’t wearing his suit jacket. He had on a grease-stained windbreaker with the logo of an Omaha roofing company on the back, and he walked with that loose-jointed shuffle men get when they spend ten hours a day on concrete floors.

He didn’t look like a man with a docket in Hastings. He looked like a man who needed to pay his electric bill before the five o’clock cutoff.

I stayed on that milk crate until my feet went numb in my boots. I didn’t feel angry. Mostly I just felt tired, the kind of heavy, wet tiredness that settles into your bones after you spend an entire morning trying to fix a hay baler with rusted bolts and baling wire that won’t hold tension.

By the time I walked back past his office at four-thirty, the light was already off. The little brass nameplate had fallen over on the corner of the windowsill, and through the glass I could see the bottom drawer of his desk standing open about two inches, showing the corner of the gray file folder and the red-and-white cardboard box of saltines.

My nephew came by the house around six with a cold turkey sandwich wrapped in wax paper and a thermos of black coffee. He sat down at the oilcloth table and dropped his heavy work gloves right on the spot where I usually keep my pencil cup.

“Did you see Vance?” he asked, biting into the sandwich. “Old man Henderson said he saw him down at the hardware store buying three padlocks and a roll of heavy chain.”

“I saw him,” I said, looking out the kitchen window at the dark line of the shelter belt against the gray Nebraska sky.

“Did he give you a receipt?”

I didn’t answer right away. I reached out and touched the edge of the oilcloth where the red check pattern was starting to wear away down to the gray backing from forty years of elbows.

“He said he was filing the praecipe in the morning,” I told him.

My nephew chewed for a second, then looked at me with those sharp, gray eyes my sister gave him before she passed. “The court’s closed on Wednesdays, Uncle Arthur. Everybody knows that. They only do probate on Thursdays.”

I didn’t say anything back. I just picked up my coffee mug and let the cold liquid sit on my tongue until the bitterness went away.

“Let it go for tonight,” he said softly, reaching out to push the thermos closer to my hand. “We got the whole weekend before the frost sets in anyway.”

I looked at the kitchen door, then down at my boots where the dry mud from the ditch was starting to flake off onto the linoleum in little gray piles.

“He had a phone,” I said. “And it wasn’t even plugged into the wall.”

My nephew didn’t laugh. He just reached over and closed the thermos lid with a sharp, metallic click that echoed off the empty cupboards.

“I know,” he said. “Everybody in this county has one of those phones now, Uncle Arthur. They just don’t all know how to pretend they’re talking to someone who cares.”