"So do I," Vera answered, and this time she did not try to make the words sound certain.
When he was gone, she stood at the fence with the water bucket pressing against her leg and felt an irritation she understood was not entirely directed at him. Daniel was allowed to worry, and the neighbors were allowed to wonder, and she herself had every right to be frightened by the arithmetic. What irritated her was the unspoken assumption that a woman without a man beside her had to explain her judgment more often than other farmers did. Her father had trained her to work this land, but some days Meade County seemed determined to regard his death as the expiration of that training.
She carried the water to the barn and found the twelve chicks arranged around the feeder with the same stubborn seriousness she had noticed at the co-op. They did not know that she had been expected to ask permission before believing in them. They did not know that six dollars was half a household account, or that a man at a fence had looked concerned when he heard what she spent. They knew only that morning had arrived and there was work to do in the simple animal sense of growing, eating, and living. Vera checked the lamp, adjusted the feeder, and returned to her own work with a steadier heart.
By the end of the second week, Vera had learned something she had not expected: the birds were going to make her reorganize the entire farm whether they became valuable or not. They required regular feed, clean water, a place protected from drafts, and constant vigilance against the predators that had already learned the weakness in her western fence. They also changed the way she moved through her day. She began her mornings in the brooder before going to the wheat field, and she finished the evening with the birds after the last task that had seemed urgent at sunrise was finally done.
She had once believed that when money was scarce, the best decision was the one that asked the least of her. The chicks were teaching her that scarcity made some investments harder, not necessarily less important. She knew there was a difference between risk supported by observation and risk supported by wishing, and she was determined to keep her decision on the first side of that line. Every morning she weighed a sample of the feed that remained, checked the birds' growth, and calculated how much longer her supply would last. Numbers might not save the farm, but they would at least tell her when danger was approaching rather than letting it arrive as a surprise.
On the first Monday in April, she returned to the co-op with a wooden box of bolts, hinges, and two broken pieces of machinery her father had stored under the workbench. Mr. Pritchard looked at the collection with the expression of a man asked to consider whether a museum belonged in a feed store.