I want you to understand something. I have been having arguments with my father about this for 3 weeks. And not once, not once did I think of that. It's easier to see from the outside. Amelia, he said her name and stopped.
Started again. If I told you that you would be welcome to come to the ranch, not as a guest exactly, but as someone who might look at the books, help reorganize the supply records, would that be inappropriate? She blinked. Your books, they're a mess, he said. And for the first time, she heard something like embarrassment in his voice.
My father kept them one way for 40 years, and I've been keeping them a different way for five, and they've never quite aligned, and we lose track of things we shouldn't lose track of. I've had two different bookkeepers tell me they couldn't make sense of it. He paused. I'm a maid, she said flatly. You taught yourself financial recordkeeping from a secondhand ledger in a hotel store room.
He said, "Don't underell yourself." She opened her mouth, closed it. "I told you that in confidence. I'm using it responsibly." She stared at him. He waited. This is a transparent attempt, she said.
To give me a reason to come to the ranch that isn't purely social, so that there's something respectable for people to point to when they talk about it. Yes, he said practically said, I thought you appreciated practical. She wanted to be annoyed. She wanted to pick up the annoyance and hold it firmly between herself and whatever was happening because whatever was happening felt very large and she had very little experience managing large things without getting hurt. But she could not quite make the annoyance stick.
Let me see the books first, she said. If they're genuinely a mess and I can genuinely help, I'll consider it. If you've manufactured a mess to give me a reason to visit, I'll know it within the first 15 minutes and I'll leave. Fair enough, he said. And I won't be paid less because I'm a woman.
He didn't even blink. I wasn't going to pay you less because you're a woman. Good. She stood up smoothed her apron. "Then bring me the ledgers." He looked up at her with that expression, still unnamed, still unsettling in its warmth.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. The ledgers arrived 2 days later, carried by a ranch hand named Hector, who set them among the kitchen table at Caldwells, with the expression of a man who had been asked to carry something he found mildly baffling. There were four of them, thick, worn at the spine, with years worth of different handwriting, and two different accounting systems running simultaneously through the same pages in a way that Amelia could see immediately had been causing problems. She sat down with the first one and didn't move for 2 hours. Margaret came in at some point, looked at the ledgers, looked at Amelia, made coffee, set a cup beside her without a word, and left.