CHAPTER 13 #3
"It sounded like what he meant. " Junie pushed a stack of feed tickets across the counter.
"I've got accounts that need cleaning before the end of the week.
Ranch folks buy on credit when weather gets mean, pay in pieces when cattle checks come in, and argue with my math when they forget what they hauled.
My old system is a cigar box, a ledger, and prayer with bad handwriting. "
"I can make a receivables sheet," Wren said before caution could stop her. "Aging columns, partial payments, supply categories. If you want it simple, I can keep it on paper and a spreadsheet both. Paper for the counter, spreadsheet for totals."
Junie's eyes narrowed in approval. "You always talk like that when you're scared?"
"Usually I offer font options first."
"Don't need fonts. Need accounts."
Wren touched the top ticket. The paper was soft from handling, printed with dust in the fibers and a coffee ring across the corner.
Real work. The label was work. Not pity tucked under a polite label.
Work with numbers, hours, a rate, and a task somebody needed done whether Wren's heart was bruised or not.
"I need to know what you pay," Wren said.
Junie named an hourly rate fair enough to make Wren's throat threaten trouble.
Wren made herself keep her face level. "That's more than I expected."
"It's less than I'd pay a bookkeeper from out of town and more than I'd pay a teenager to alphabetize receipts wrong."
"How many hours?"
"Start with two afternoons. If you don't make a hash of it, more."
"I won't make a hash of it."
"Didn't figure. " Junie pointed at the stool behind the side counter. "Sit. Show me how you'd sort that stack."
Wren sat.
For the next hour, the feed store changed shape around her.
It stopped being only the room where people watched her and became columns, dates, invoice numbers, and names she did not speak aloud because names were not the point.
She made piles by month, then by account status.
She drew boxes on Junie's yellow pad, turning the mess into a map.
Paid. Partial. Outstanding. Disputed. Supplies that could wait.
Supplies that could not because animals still had to eat when pride got expensive.
Junie watched without hovering. She helped when Wren asked what shorthand meant, corrected one assumption about mineral blocks, and told her which ranchers needed a phone call instead of a mailed reminder because dignity mattered even when a balance was overdue.
"You do understand this town," Junie said after Wren explained how a payment note could be firm without sounding like a threat.
Wren shook her head. "I understand bills."
"Same roots half the time."
Wren's pencil paused. Outside, a truck passed slow enough to throw dust against the windows.
Inside, the fan kept clicking, and the coffee on the warmer went stale.
She thought of Colt doing late checks because he had traded his morning for Beau.
She thought of his closed face around money and the unopened places in his life she had no right to pry open.
She thought of her own account balance, of Paloma's wedding cash already assigned to car repairs and groceries, of the shame that made her want to pretend she was choosing from options she did not have.
"I can come tomorrow after chapel errands," she said. "And Friday if you still need me."
"I'll need you. " Junie took the pencil back, wrote something on the corner of the pad, tore it off, and handed it over.
It was the rate, the hours, and the word paid underlined once.
Wren stared at it too long.
Junie's voice gentled without losing its grit. "Let a job be a job, honey. It doesn't have to be a referendum on your worth."
Wren folded the paper carefully and tucked it into her wallet. Her thumb brushed the thin stack of bills inside, counting by feel before she could stop herself.
"Thank you," she said.
"Thank me by showing up on time and not letting Cressie make you foolish."
"Those may require different skill sets."
"You've got both."
Wren wished that were true without effort. She wished kindness did not make her suspicious first and grateful second. She wished a child's sticky hand in hers had not felt like a door opening onto a room she wanted and feared in equal measure.
The bell rang once as the last coffee-counter woman left.
Junie began closing the register drawer, and the sun slid low enough to turn the feed sacks gold along the wall.
Before evening, then. Cressie had done exactly what Cressie did: taken a scraped knee and made it a warning.
By supper, someone would tell someone who would tell someone else that Wren had been kneeling beside Beau like she belonged there.
By morning, the story might have grown teeth.
Wren gathered her purse and stepped outside.
The heat had softened but not broken. Dust clung to her calves.
The grass marks on her knees had faded to pale red ladders.
On her cuff, the grape jelly had dried into a dark crescent, tacky when she rubbed it between finger and thumb.
It should have been a stain to wash out.
Instead it looked like evidence. Beau had reached for her, and Wren had stayed inside the boundary as best she could.
Her phone buzzed before she reached the car.
For one hopeful second, she thought of Colt. A simple message, maybe. Beau's knee survived the couch. Thank you. Something small enough to hold without breaking.
The screen showed Odette Pryce.
Wren stood in the feed-store dust with Junie's paid hours folded in her wallet and Beau's grape jelly drying on her sleeve, and opened the message.
Odette: You are repeating the same mistake, Wren, only this time there is a child in the middle.