fitting, a thin ewe that turned out to be carrying twins, a sack of seed passed over because the label had fallen away. He was not right every time, a fact he never concealed. But when Vera asked him why he bothered, he would always say that the unusual thing was either worthless or worth everything, and the only way to find out was to take it seriously.
She knew what caution said. She knew what Mr. Pritchard would say, what the neighbors would say, and what Daniel Alderman would say if he heard she'd bought twelve chickens without knowing whether they could produce a single decent egg. She also knew that every decision she had made strictly to avoid risk for the past two years had kept the farm alive without helping it grow stronger. Staying safe and standing still had begun to look so much alike that she was no longer certain which one she had been doing.
"Six for all twelve?" she asked.
"Six dollars even."
"I'll need that crate, too."
Whitfield studied her, perhaps wondering whether she intended to bargain over the box after accepting a price no experienced buyer had bothered to challenge. "Take the crate," he said. "It's got a loose board, anyhow."
Vera took six dollars from the envelope in her handbag and laid the bills in his palm before another part of her could stop her. She watched him count them, then carried the crate to her truck with both arms around it and settled it on a folded horse blanket behind the cab. A man loading feed into a wagon looked at the birds and laughed once, not unkindly, but loudly enough for her to hear. She tightened the rope across the crate without turning around.
The trip home took twenty-seven minutes. At every rut, Vera glanced over her shoulder to make sure the birds were steady, and at every long straight stretch she tried not to think about the money. She told herself that the four dollars reserved for feed had become three dollars and that planting would have to be done carefully. Then she remembered that chickens ate every day, regardless of whether they were an excellent investment or an expensive mistake. By the time the farm buildings appeared above the low rise, she had already begun rearranging the coming month's expenses in her head.
She backed the truck toward the east side of the barn, where the boards blocked the worst of the wind. The old brooder from the previous year's unsuccessful broiler attempt stood beneath a tarp, a square wooden box she had built from leftover boards and hoped never to use again. That earlier effort had failed because a sudden cold night caught her with a bad lamp and too little spare fuel. Four birds had died, and the rest had cost more to raise than she received when she sold them. Vera remembered every one of those numbers, and she knew that repeating a loss while pretending it was new would be worse than the first mistake.