My heart sank. She’d been doing all this alone, fighting for both herself and her baby. I took her hand and squeezed it. She startled by the motion, but smiled and kept her hand in mind.
She looked back at the ledger. “After he died,” she said, and her voice caught, one small snag in the thread of it, and then went even again. “I just kept paying what was on the invoices.”
“That’s what most people do,” I said. I did not say it to make her feel better about it. I said it because it was true.
I pulled the pen from my shirt pocket, the old one, a ballpoint I had carried since before I could remember replacing it, and I began marking. I circled the hay supplier line and wrote a number in the margin, which was what the same grade of hay was going for at the co-op in the next county based on what I had priced last spring. The difference between the two numbers was not a comfortable thing to look at. I kept moving.
On the second page, there was a farrier charge that ran every eight weeks with the regularity of a fixed expense rather than a service, which told me the rate had never been questioned. I circled it.
“What is it?” she asked. She had leaned forward a fraction, I noticed, her elbows coming back to the table, the defensive brace of her shoulders loosening by some small degree. She was following my pen.
“Farrier you’ve got is running you forty percent over the county average,” I said. “That’s not a judgment, it’s just the number.” I turned the ledger toward her so she could see what I had written. “I’ve used this man before. He does good work and he doesn’t charge for the drive out.”
She looked at the name in the margin. Then she looked at the circled figure above it. “Right,” she said.
I pulled out my phone and scrolled. Found the contact I was looking for and turned the screen toward her, a name, a number, a small note I had kept in the contact field: bulk feed, Thompson’s Valley, good rates, honest.
“My cousin,” I said. “He runs bulk feed out of Thompson’s Valley. Pricing is about thirty percent below what you’recurrently paying on the hay line.” I held the phone between us. “You want me to connect you?”
She looked at the screen. She looked at it for long enough that I had time to notice she was actually reading the contact information rather than just looking at the gesture of it, and then she looked up at me.
“Yes,” she said.
I opened a message and typed it out at the table, phone flat on the wood beside the ledger: her name, the ranch, the approximate volume, a note that the rates they were currently running had room to move. I sent it and set the phone face-up between us.
She watched me do it. When I set the phone down, she looked at it, then at the ledger, then at the figure I had circled on the hay line and the number I had written beside it.
“Keep going,” she said. It was not quite a request and not quite an instruction. She moved her elbows to the table and leaned in.
I turned the page.
The vet expenses ran across two pages, itemized by date and livestock, and I went through them the way I went through most problems, which was with the kind of attention you give a thing when you want to understand it rather than fix it first. The rates were not unreasonable on their own, but the travel charges were. I wrote a name in the margin. A woman who ran a mobile practice out of a truck and did sliding-scale rates for working ranches.
“She works on a sliding scale for operations under a certain size,” I said. “Yours qualifies.”
Lila looked at the name I had written. “She any good?”
“Better than average.” I said it without hedging, because there was no point in hedging. “She does equine and bovine both. She’s out here in the county three days a week.”
Lila smiled and nodded.
We worked through the next pages together. At some point I had stopped being the only one moving across the ledger. She had shifted her weight forward and her finger was tracking a line I was pointing to, following the figures, and her elbow was two inches from mine. I did not comment on this or make anything of it. I kept moving through the page.
The ledger smelled of old paper and something faintly floral, which I understood was her rather than the book. The pages were dense: Ethan’s handwriting giving way to hers partway through the year, the transition obvious if you were looking for it, the heavier pen pressure lightening, the crossed sevens disappearing, a different system of notation taking over. She had picked up his ledger and kept going. I looked at the place where one hand became the other and then looked back at the column of figures I had been working on.
On the blank corner of the last invoice in the stack, I laid out the arithmetic. The hay supplier saving, the farrier differential, the vet travel charges. I worked through it without hurrying, adding each line, checking the total once and then again because I was careful about numbers. When I had a figure I was satisfied with, I pushed the invoice toward her.
The number was not small. It was not a solution. But it was a different shape than the one she had been sitting with, and that was something.
She looked at it.
I watched her read it. She went through the lines first, the way a careful person reads any document, checking the workingbefore she accepted the conclusion, and I waited while she did it. Then she got to the total at the bottom. Her exhale was long and slow and entirely audible in the quiet kitchen, the kind of breath that had been held for a while before it was let out.
She did not say anything for a moment.
The light above us threw its warm, narrow light across the invoice, across the total I had written in the margin of it, across her hands where they rested flat on either side of the paper. The kitchen was quiet around us, the pipes settled, the wind working at the eaves in the low, persistent way it had all week. Outside, beyond the light had dimmed and the moon became more visible.
She looked up from the paper, then looked at me. Her mouth pressed into a smile. I held it for a second. Then I looked back at the ledger and pulled it toward me to set the pen mark I had meant to make on the last page.
