Delaney asked him to estimate the cost of making the three wet ponds usable, and he gave her a range that made her close her notebook. She had saved a few thousand dollars from work, and part of it had already been earmarked for her grandfather's remaining bills. Roy suggested that hay would be an easier way to make modest use of the land and that selling might still be the sensible answer. She drove home angry with him for being realistic, although she knew realism was exactly what she had gone there to find.
Over the next two weeks she returned before work and again on weekends, clearing brush, collecting debris, and learning the difference between a repair and something that merely looked repaired. She hired a local operator to stabilize the most dangerous stretch of bank because Roy had warned her that a shovel and determination were no substitute for the right equipment. The job cost more than she liked, but watching the compacted clay settle into place made the old property feel less like a mistake. She kept every receipt in a folder marked PONDS, as though the label might make the spending seem official.
Her apartment began to fill with charts and library books on fish farming. She watched recorded extension lectures after dinner, paused whenever someone used a term she did not recognize, and wrote definitions in the margins of a secondhand notebook. She learned that a pond did not become suitable for fish simply because it held water, and that decisions about stocking had to account for oxygen, temperature, species, carrying capacity, and access to dependable equipment. Knowing this did not make her an expert; it mainly taught her how far she was from being one.
At her office job, the workday began to stretch like a rubber band. She still reconciled invoices accurately and answered calls on time, but she now used lunch breaks to compare repair quotes and ask suppliers about aeration equipment. Her supervisor, a woman named Diane, noticed mud on the cuffs of Delaney's trousers and asked whether she had started doing landscaping on the side. Delaney said she was trying to find out whether she could raise fish, and Diane laughed before she realized Delaney wasn't joking.
"Your grandfather left you a pond?" Diane asked. Delaney corrected her gently: four ponds, though only three held water. "Sounds like he left you a hole to pour money into," Diane said, and then returned to her computer without another thought. Delaney wanted to be offended, but the sentence was so close to her own private fear that she could only go back to work.
The first serious complication was not the land itself but the cost of stocking it. The hatcheries Roy recommended sold healthy, graded fish in quantities designed for businesses with established budgets. Even a cautious first batch would leave little room for feed and emergency repairs, and Roy insisted she keep money available for the problems that would come after the fish arrived. Delaney asked whether there was any legal way to begin with smaller quantities or surplus stock that commercial customers did not want.