"I'm here to cook." Wyatt nodded once and set his bowl on the drying rack. "Room's at the top of the stairs, second door. It locks from inside." She looked at him.
He was already heading out. She appreciated that he had said it plainly. That night, she sat on the narrow bed in the room that smelled of cedar and old quilts and did her arithmetic. Wages for 1 month minus what she owed the bank minus 2 months back rent to Mrs. Henshaw left her with almost nothing, but almost nothing was better than the nothing she currently had and better than what happened on day nine if she were not here.
She had bought herself time. Time was the only currency that mattered right now. She blew out the lamp. Outside, she could hear the plains wind moving through the tall grass like a long slow exhale. And beyond that, the sound of the oldest boy's voice, low and steadying, talking to one of the younger ones in a room down the hall.
She lay in the dark and thought about what kind of man lets six sons run a household into disorganization. And then amended the thought. What kind of grief does that to a man? She did not make the mistake of thinking those were the same question. Three days passed.
She learned the household by its rhythms. The boys woke at five without being called, all of them, even Emmett, who had to be physically levered out of bed by the brother she now knew as Colt, the third oldest, a 14-year-old with a streak of mischief he was doing an inadequate job of suppressing. The father was up before all of them, out with the herd before light, back at noon covered in dust and saying little. The noon meal was the one where she had begun to see the most, who ate fast and who ate slow, who was carrying something, who was pretending not to. The second boy, Dash, 16, with his father's compressed expression already setting in, had started putting his plate near the stove before she asked him to because he had noticed she could not carry the pot and the plates at the same time.
He did not mention it. She did not thank him for it. They understood each other. On the fourth morning, she found the ledger. It was sitting on the kitchen shelf between a tin of tobacco and a broken pocket watch, and she only picked it up because she was reaching for the tobacco tin to move it.
She needed the shelf space for drying herbs she'd found growing wild at the edge of the kitchen garden, rosemary and dried thyme that had survived on stubbornness alone. The ledger fell open in her hands to the last page with writing. The numbers were wrong, not fraudulent. She had seen fraudulent books. She knew the difference.
But wrong in the way of a man who had stopped being careful. Feed costs carried over from the wrong month. A cattle sale recorded twice. Loan interest calculated on the original principle without accounting for partial payments made. The error was significant.