Chapter Five – Cole37
Chapter Five – Cole
The following morning, the kitchen light was the only one on in the house.
I had seen it from across the yard on my way back from checking the water line at the east trough, and thought nothing of it, as she always kept lights on, I’d noticed that in the first days, the way you learn the habits of a house you’re moving through carefully.
But when I stomped the worst of the mud from my boots and came through the back door, I took my boots up and straightened, then stopped.
She hadn’t heard me, and was bent over the kitchen table with her back curved and her shoulders drawn up near her ears, both elbows on the wood, and the table around her was covered edge to edge in invoices.
She’d tried to separate them into two rough stacks, but seem puzzled by the remaining ones.
A ledger lay open, dense with figures, and a mug sat pushed to the corner, cold by the look of it, the tea or coffee inside it having gone the color of old wood.
Her pen was jammed against a column in the ledger, not moving.
Her free hand was pressed flat to the side of her belly, the way she pressed it sometimes without knowing she was doing it… I had noticed that too.
I watched her for a moment. The light above the table was the warm, narrow light of the fixture above, and it caught the side of her face and the top of her hair, the light brown of it gone amber in that lamp’s particular opinion about color.
Her head was down. Then, without any preamble, a single tear dropped from her jaw onto the invoice in front of her.
She saw it happen, or felt it, and her hand came up fast, the back of her wrist across her jaw, and then her fingers went to her eyes and pressed, hard, like she was fixing something rather than feeling it.
I should have announced myself. The sensible thing was to clear my throat or back out or make some sound that gave her the option of composing herself before she knew I was there. I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I crossed to the table and pulled out the chair beside her and sat down.
She came half out of her seat. Her hands swept the papers toward her chest in one fast, instinctive movement, pulling them in close like she’d been caught at something that required hiding.
She looked at me with the expression of a woman whose guard had come up so hard and fast it had hit the ceiling on the way.
I held up my hand, palm out, fingers together. Said nothing.
She looked at my hand. She looked at me. She was reading me the way she always did, quickly and without charity, looking for the angle in it.
I kept my hand up and waited, and after a moment she set the papers back down on the table.
I reached over and began straightening them.
The invoices first, edges aligned, the corners corrected where they had fanned out and overlapped.
I worked without hurry, setting each sheet flat and even, and I kept my eyes on what I was doing rather than on her, which seemed to help.
The ledger was already open, and I turned it toward me slightly and began reading from the top of the page.
It was old. Dog-eared at the corners and stained along where a cup had been set on it that the page darkened by a circular ringlet.
The margins were crowded: figures, notes, the occasional question mark beside a line item, the kind of shorthand a person develops for a document they live with.
There were two different hands in it. One was a man’s hand with larger letters, the pen pressure heavier, a habit of writing numbers with the seven crossed.
I recognized the difference between it and the hand beside it, smaller and more precise, without letting myself think too much about what that recognition meant.
The current page was laid out in columns: suppliers down one side, amounts down the other, dates in a third. Several figures had been circled in red ink, two of them twice, with a line running between them and a question mark at the end of the line. The circled numbers were not small.
I worked my jaw and kept reading.
“This your regular hay supplier?” I said. I tapped the line with one finger.
She looked at where I was pointing. “Since we were given the place, yes.”
“How long have you been paying this rate for feed?”
A pause. “Two years, maybe. Ethan, my husband used to handle the supplier negotiations.” She was married.
I’d guessed at much looking down at the ring on her finger.
I’d guess she’d married a Beta perhaps, as Alphas didn’t worry about marriage, pack bonds were much stronger.
I pursed my lips thinking. But where was he?
I asked the next question very carefully. “Is he around so I can ask him about them?”
Her bottom lip wobbled, then she straightened her spine, and took a deep breath. “No, he… he died… in a storm.”
My heart sank. She’d been doing all this alone, fighting for both herself and her baby. I took her hand and squeezed it. She startled by the motion, but smiled and kept her hand in mind.
She looked back at the ledger. “After he died,” she said, and her voice caught, one small snag in the thread of it, and then went even again. “I just kept paying what was on the invoices.”
“That’s what most people do,” I said. I did not say it to make her feel better about it. I said it because it was true.
I pulled the pen from my shirt pocket, the old one, a ballpoint I had carried since before I could remember replacing it, and I began marking.
I circled the hay supplier line and wrote a number in the margin, which was what the same grade of hay was going for at the co-op in the next county based on what I had priced last spring.
The difference between the two numbers was not a comfortable thing to look at. I kept moving.
On the second page, there was a farrier charge that ran every eight weeks with the regularity of a fixed expense rather than a service, which told me the rate had never been questioned. I circled it.
“What is it?” she asked. She had leaned forward a fraction, I noticed, her elbows coming back to the table, the defensive brace of her shoulders loosening by some small degree. She was following my pen.
“Farrier you’ve got is running you forty percent over the county average,” I said. “That’s not a judgment, it’s just the number.” I turned the ledger toward her so she could see what I had written. “I’ve used this man before. He does good work and he doesn’t charge for the drive out.”
She looked at the name in the margin. Then she looked at the circled figure above it. “Right,” she said.
I pulled out my phone and scrolled. Found the contact I was looking for and turned the screen toward her, a name, a number, a small note I had kept in the contact field: bulk feed, Thompson’s Valley, good rates, honest.
“My cousin,” I said. “He runs bulk feed out of Thompson’s Valley. Pricing is about thirty percent below what you’re currently paying on the hay line.” I held the phone between us. “You want me to connect you?”
She looked at the screen. She looked at it for long enough that I had time to notice she was actually reading the contact information rather than just looking at the gesture of it, and then she looked up at me.
“Yes,” she said.
I opened a message and typed it out at the table, phone flat on the wood beside the ledger: her name, the ranch, the approximate volume, a note that the rates they were currently running had room to move. I sent it and set the phone face-up between us.
She watched me do it. When I set the phone down, she looked at it, then at the ledger, then at the figure I had circled on the hay line and the number I had written beside it.
“Keep going,” she said. It was not quite a request and not quite an instruction. She moved her elbows to the table and leaned in.
I turned the page.
The vet expenses ran across two pages, itemized by date and livestock, and I went through them the way I went through most problems, which was with the kind of attention you give a thing when you want to understand it rather than fix it first. The rates were not unreasonable on their own, but the travel charges were.
I wrote a name in the margin. A woman who ran a mobile practice out of a truck and did sliding-scale rates for working ranches.
“She works on a sliding scale for operations under a certain size,” I said. “Yours qualifies.”
Lila looked at the name I had written. “She any good?”
“Better than average.” I said it without hedging, because there was no point in hedging. “She does equine and bovine both. She’s out here in the county three days a week.”
Lila smiled and nodded.
We worked through the next pages together.
At some point I had stopped being the only one moving across the ledger.
She had shifted her weight forward and her finger was tracking a line I was pointing to, following the figures, and her elbow was two inches from mine.
I did not comment on this or make anything of it. I kept moving through the page.
The ledger smelled of old paper and something faintly floral, which I understood was her rather than the book.
The pages were dense: Ethan’s handwriting giving way to hers partway through the year, the transition obvious if you were looking for it, the heavier pen pressure lightening, the crossed sevens disappearing, a different system of notation taking over.
She had picked up his ledger and kept going.
I looked at the place where one hand became the other and then looked back at the column of figures I had been working on.
On the blank corner of the last invoice in the stack, I laid out the arithmetic.
The hay supplier saving, the farrier differential, the vet travel charges.
I worked through it without hurrying, adding each line, checking the total once and then again because I was careful about numbers.
When I had a figure I was satisfied with, I pushed the invoice toward her.
The number was not small. It was not a solution. But it was a different shape than the one she had been sitting with, and that was something.
She looked at it.
I watched her read it. She went through the lines first, the way a careful person reads any document, checking the working before she accepted the conclusion, and I waited while she did it.
Then she got to the total at the bottom.
Her exhale was long and slow and entirely audible in the quiet kitchen, the kind of breath that had been held for a while before it was let out.
She did not say anything for a moment.
The light above us threw its warm, narrow light across the invoice, across the total I had written in the margin of it, across her hands where they rested flat on either side of the paper.
The kitchen was quiet around us, the pipes settled, the wind working at the eaves in the low, persistent way it had all week.
Outside, beyond the light had dimmed and the moon became more visible.
She looked up from the paper, then looked at me. Her mouth pressed into a smile. I held it for a second. Then I looked back at the ledger and pulled it toward me to set the pen mark I had meant to make on the last page.
“I can call the farrier in the morning,” I said. “If you want.”
She looked back at the invoice. At the total. “Yeah,” she said, after a moment. “Alright.”
I set the pen down on the table. The invoices were in a clean stack now, the ledger closed with the pen laid across the cover. The cold mug sat where it had been all along, pushed to the corner of the table, forgotten. I looked at it.
“You want a fresh cup?” I asked.
She looked at the mug like she had only just remembered it. “It’s getting late,” she said.
“It is,” I said, and left it there for her to answer or not.
She was quiet for a moment. Her hands were still on either side of the invoice with the total on it.
“Yeah,” she said, finally. “Alright.”
I pushed back from the table and went to put the kettle on.