Daniel removed his hat and let out a breath that sounded like laughter and disbelief together. He came down the barn steps and stopped in front of her, as though uncertain whether she would welcome a celebration that had nothing to do with practical repairs. Vera solved the problem by stepping forward and putting her arms around him. He held her carefully at first, then firmly, and for several moments neither said anything.
When she drew back, there was dust on his shirt and a smudge of paint on her sleeve. "You ought to have been there," she said.
"At the bank?"
"At the co-op last March. The day I bought them. You would have made such a face."
"I made it the following Saturday, as I remember."
"You did. And you repeated six dollars twice, as though I might have forgotten what it cost."
He laughed then, more openly than she had ever heard him laugh at the fence. "I expect you'll remind me of that until we're both old."
Vera surprised herself by not correcting the word we're. She looked toward the original flock, older now and slightly less glossy after a full laying season, but still active and bright-eyed in the late afternoon sun. The twelve hens had done their share of the work, and their descendants had begun doing theirs. The farm had become larger than her first calculations, and in other ways smaller, because the distance between the barn and the house no longer seemed to contain everything she had lost.
The county did not become suddenly generous toward her, nor did everyone who had doubted her line up to apologize. Some farmers said she had been lucky to find birds the university wanted, and luck had certainly been part of the beginning. Others suggested the college had paid too much for an uncertain line or that Vera should take her profits and abandon an experiment which might not remain profitable next year. She listened to those opinions as she listened to weather predictions, considering the useful information and leaving the rest behind. Nobody else had to live with the decisions she had made, and she had learned not to spend much energy persuading them to approve.
Martha Greer remained her most enthusiastic customer. She had expanded her shelf space for the blue-white eggs and continued paying the agreed premium when the quality justified it. Vera declined an offer from a traveling merchant who wanted to buy the entire weekly supply and resell it under a more glamorous label that left the Aldren name off the carton. The merchant assured her that buyers in larger towns would care more about appearance than a small Kansas farm, and Vera told him they were welcome to buy ordinary eggs somewhere else if a truthful label made his business difficult. Martha laughed for a full minute after he left.
The farm's success also changed the way young people looked at it. Ben began bringing questions from his younger sister, who wanted to know whether Vera would teach her to keep records for a small flock of her own. A girl named Elsie arrived one Saturday carrying three eggs from