He left in April. Has anyone replaced him? Nathan wrapped both hands around the coffee cup. Not yet.
She waited. I know how to manage a ranch, he said. And there was an edge in it. Not at her exactly, but at the situation.
I've been doing it since I was 19. I know the land and the stock and the men. The paperwork is. He stopped.
It's different, she said. It's a different kind of work. I can help with it. She said it evenly, not making it an offer he had to feel grateful for, just stating it like information.
I'm not a trained bookkeeper, but I can add figures and organize correspondence. And I understand enough about accounts to catch errors. If you want to keep the management decisions yourself, which you should, I can do the clerical part. He looked at her across the table.
You didn't advertise for that in the notice, she added. I know, but it needs doing, and I can do it, and that's usually reason enough. He drank from the coffee cup. Where did you learn accounts?
My father's farm, then a dry good store in Columbus, where I kept the books for 2 years. She didn't mention why she'd left the dry goods store, which was that the owner had decided after 2 years that she knew too much about the business for his comfort, which was the kind of thing that happened to women who were good at things men hadn't expected them to be good at. I'm not suggesting anything beyond the clerical work. Your business is your business."
Nathan set the cup down. He was quiet for a moment that stretched long enough she thought he might not answer. "I'll show you the books tomorrow," he said. "If you're willing."
"I'm willing." She stood up and went to check the stove damper for the night. Behind her, she heard Nathan pushed back from the table. Heard the familiar sound of him going down the hall to check on Caleb the way he did every night before bed, the way she'd come to think of as the period at the end of each day's sentence.
The books were worse than she'd expected and better than she'd feared, which was not the same as being all right. What she found when Nathan spread them on the desk the next morning was a ranch operation that had been before March solidly managed, records kept carefully, accounts settled regularly, a man who knew where his money went and kept track of it with the kind of methodical attention that built lasting operations. And then March and the books had simply stopped. There were receipts stuffed loosely into the pages, unrecorded.
There were invoices unpaid, not because there wasn't money, but because the act of recording them required a man to sit at a desk and think in a straight line, and grief, she knew, was the enemy of straight lines. She didn't say any of this to Nathan. She just sat down and started. She worked through the backlog over three days, an hour or two each evening after Caleb was sleeping.