I'm the one who rehangs the doors and mends the fence. I'm not fancy. I don't have much to say most evenings. I'm 43 years old and I've got about 160 acres and some cattle and a barn that mostly doesn't leak." I stopped.
I had said as much as I knew how to say about myself in one go. Then I said, "But I'd treat you right. That I can promise." She set her cup down on the window sill, careful not putting it down hard, and she looked out the window for long enough that I heard myself thinking, "All right, Caleb. All right, you said it.
Let it go." Then she said, "How long has that fence been down on the east side?" I said, "3 weeks. I've been getting to it." She said, "Two people get to things faster than one."
She was still looking out the window. A thing passed over her face, something I didn't have a name for, something that moved through and was gone. Then she turned back to me and she was clear-eyed and steady and she said, "I'd want to know what I was agreeing to. The honest version, not the selling one." I said, "That's all I've got."
We talked for an hour, not the stiff talk of strangers being careful, real talk. The shape of the ranch, the money that was in it, the money that wasn't. Where the title sat, what the house needed. She asked straight questions and I gave straight answers. She didn't flinch at any of it.
At one point, she said the accounts sounded like they'd been kept by someone who thought arithmetic was a personal enemy. And I said that was fair. And she said she'd like to look at them. And I went and got the ledger and put it in front of her, and she spent 20 minutes with it while I drank coffee and looked out the window. She found two errors, not small ones.
She pointed them out without comment. Just put her finger on each one, looked up at me, looked back down. I said, "How bad?" She said, "Not ruinous, but you've been paying the Hendersons about $14 a year more than you owe them." I thought about that for a second, then I laughed.
I don't laugh easy, and when I do it comes out a little rusty, and she looked at me with something startled in her face, not alarmed, just like the sound surprised her, and then her mouth moved. Not a full smile yet, the corner of it. That corner. Denton came down at half past seven and found us at the table with the ledger open between us and her coffee half drunk, and actually warm this time. And he stood in the doorway and read the room, and being Denton he grinned before he even understood what he was looking at.
He had good instincts that way, even when he'd been the one to create the situation. He said good morning to us both, took his hat from the hook, and went out. That was Denton. He didn't make it difficult. It wasn't his nature to make things difficult after he'd lost interest in them.