He sat beside her for a while, watching the sun flatten into the fields. Then he said he had never worked anywhere that treated scraps like they were worth so much trouble. Marlene replied that the trouble was what gave them value, not the scraps by themselves. It was a distinction she wanted him to remember, because even a fortunate opportunity could become a disaster if a person mistook cheap ingredients for a finished business.
The telephone rang just after six on an October morning, while Marlene was standing in the yard with a mug of coffee and trying to decide whether the western sky meant rain. Rick Doherty was already on the move. She could hear the slap of his shoes against a concrete floor and someone calling a question about a delivery in the background. He asked whether she had a minute, which was the sort of courtesy a person offered when the news would not be good.
"Fat's got a price now," he said. "Rendering yards started bidding again. Fifty-five cents a pound, and our hauler is willing to pay us instead of charging us. I'm sorry, Marlene. Nothing personal." She watched a mockingbird land on the fence while he explained that the market had changed and he had to account for the material. He sounded regretful without sounding uncertain. A man responsible for fourteen locations could not justify giving away something another company offered to buy.
Marlene thanked him for calling instead of letting the next truck arrive with an unexpected bill. She asked when the new price would apply and whether Ironwood still intended to keep the kitchen logs attached to her deliveries. Rick said she could have the paperwork as long as she continued buying the material. Then he told her there was a lot of demand for rendered animal fat lately and that plenty of people were paying more than they had the previous season.
After the call, Marlene set her coffee on the tailgate and opened her ledger. By then, she had received roughly fourteen thousand pounds of raw material, counting the eighteen hundred pounds lost to the heat wave. She wanted to reach twenty thousand pounds before the spring deadline, leaving about six thousand to collect. At the new price, six thousand pounds would cost $3,300 before she paid a driver, powered the kettle, or purchased a single label.
Her first instinct was to argue with the arithmetic. She told herself that paying even a small amount for what she had once collected free would destroy the advantage that made the whole enterprise possible. Then she remembered that she had spent the previous months collecting more than one kind of information. She turned back to the yield sheets she had filled out when the barrels were still free, and began comparing the pits instead of the prices.
Most of the fourteen Ironwood locations produced acceptable smoked fat, but their yields varied more than she had expected. Some cooks left a high proportion of recoverable tallow; others sent more moisture, lean tissue, and material that could not become the uniform product she wanted. She had measured every batch in the same way and recorded both the incoming weight and the finished output. The differences were large enough that a single average hid more than it explained.