Those small conversations mattered. Marlene had spent so much energy looking toward one large transaction that she sometimes overlooked the ordinary business forming beneath it. The woman who had bought jars at the market for her husband had ordered gifts for relatives, and Boone had placed another order because his onion rings were no longer a seasonal special. Customers were beginning to ask for her product by name, not merely as a curiosity someone had mentioned. The growing demand did not remove the March deadline, but it gave her a future beyond the yes or no of a single company.
Back at the farm, Eli was preparing the final collections from the selected Ironwood pits. The cumulative raw-material total was approaching nineteen thousand pounds, less than the ambitious twenty thousand Marlene had once written at the top of the ledger but enough to support the finished inventory she was building. The change from fourteen locations to four had taught her that the number of incoming pounds was not the same as the number of usable pounds. She had originally set the target before she understood how greatly the source affected her yield, and now she cared more about the measured finished product than a round number she had written in fear.
One morning a lot arrived with a smudged pit stencil and an incomplete cook sheet. The driver said the kitchen had been busy and that the barrel almost certainly contained the proper fat. Eli checked the remaining labels and told Marlene he thought they could probably match it to the route. The old Marlene, exhausted and eager to meet a target, might have accepted the guess. The Marlene who had lost eighteen hundred pounds in the heat wave put the lot on hold until Denise could provide an authoritative correction.
It took two days to settle the discrepancy. The delay pushed one processing run into the weekend and forced Eli to miss an evening he had planned with friends. He complained, then apologized when he saw how carefully Marlene was trying to arrange the work around his schedule. She told him he had every right to be disappointed, but the missing document did not become less important because both of them were tired.
By the last week of December, the rooms were full of finished and in-process inventory, the paperwork was in order, and the money was dangerously thin. Marlene called Wade and thanked him for his offer. She said she could not commit the nine thousand pounds on his terms. He paused before answering, then told her he hoped she had another buyer who understood what the material was worth.
"Not yet," Marlene said. "I believe I can find one." Wade told her to call if her circumstances changed, but he would not hold the same offer open in the new year. They ended the conversation cordially. Marlene placed his letter inside a drawer with the loan statements and closed it before she could read the number again.