She looked at him the same way he was looking at her directly without flinching, which was something he probably wasn't used to from the women in his experience, which if his experience was anything like most 22-year-old men who'd grown up running a ranch with an absent father called her, she said, "I'm not going around you. I'm trying to understand what we're dealing with before the cold hits. If you want to be part of those conversations, I would genuinely welcome that. I'm not here to cut you out of decisions about this ranch. " He was quiet for a moment. The fire in the stove crackled.
"You don't have the right to make decisions about this ranch," she said. "I understand that's how you see it. That's how it is. " "Then tell me what information I'm allowed to gather," she said. "Because if I'm supposed to fix the books without knowing what anything costs, I'm going to make a mess of it, and we'll both regret that. " Another silence, longer this time. "You want to fix the books? " he said.
It wasn't a question. It was him trying to figure out if that was all she wanted. I want the ranch to still be here in 5 years, she said. That's what I want. He looked at her for another full 5 seconds.
Then he said, "The Kellerman brothers are selling off their east pasture. Dad knows about it, but he hasn't moved. If we had the capital, that land would double our grazing range and solve three problems at once. " She hadn't known about it. She picked up her pen and wrote it down. "What's the asking price? " she said.
He told her. They talked for 40 minutes. It was the first real conversation they'd had. Not a confrontation, not a transaction, but an actual exchange of information between two people who both, it turned out, cared about the same thing. When he got up to go to bed, he paused at the doorway.
The supplier you wrote to, he said, Halverson Brothers are cheaper if you order before October. Dad used to use them, then switched when they raised rates. You'd have to ask Warren if he'll go back. She wrote that down, too. Thank you, she said.
He walked out without answering, but she heard his footsteps pause on the stairs just for a moment before they continued up. It was three weeks into her time at the Danner Ranch that Tessa made the proposal that either was going to save them or mark her as someone who didn't know when to stop pushing. She had spent those 3 weeks building her picture of the operation, the actual picture, not the one in the ledger, which was incomplete in the ways that books always are, when the people keeping them are too exhausted to be a thorough. She understood the cattle count, the pasture rotation, the equipment status, the labor shortfall, the debt timeline. The debt timeline was the thing that kept her awake.
They had a loan coming due on equipment, a hay press, and a set of water pumps that had been deferred once already. The lending operation in Missoula was not going to defer it again. If that payment came due and they couldn't meet it, they would have to sell cattle to cover it, which would put them below the minimum herd size for a profitable winter operation, which meant the following spring would start from a position of recovery rather than growth. Recovery operations fail. She had seen it in the account she'd kept.