Part 3
The church kitchen was thirty-six miles in the opposite direction from the bakery. Vera discovered that after breakfast, with three customers expecting her before noon. She stood over the atlas and moved her finger between the towns as if a shorter road might appear beneath it.
She called the bakery and moved that appointment. The woman who answered was pleasant until Vera offered a time after their morning production, then became brisk. They settled on the following day, and Vera wrote the change directly over a grease stain on the old job sheet.
Jess found her there when she came to check the feed delivery. “You’ve got a phone with a map in it.”
“The phone doesn’t show me every road at once.”
“It will show you the bridge that’s closed.” Jess leaned over the atlas and pointed. “You can’t cross there.”
Vera had driven that bridge hundreds of times. She checked the county’s road notice on her phone, then looked again at the route she’d drawn. Jess didn’t pretend not to notice the correction.
They worked out an order that would get Vera to the church kitchen first. Marlene Price, the woman who ran its volunteer schedule, showed her the warming cabinet and the meal calendar beside it. Vera secured the door, marked the cabinet out of use, and ordered the hinge before promising a return visit.
“The fourteenth, before noon,” Marlene said. “We set up at two. I can arrange something else if you tell me now.”
“I’ll be here.”
By evening, Vera’s back ached from carrying the tool case. At the farm she found Jess finishing the water check, with an eight-year-old girl sitting on the milk-room step. The girl held a bicycle bell in both hands and had arranged its loose pieces in the lid of a feed supplement tub.
“Naomi,” Jess said. “This is Vera.”
Naomi looked up. “She says I’m missing a spring.”
Vera crouched beside the lid. She could see where the spring should sit and the small bright place where it had rubbed. “She’s right. Don’t throw away the cover. We’ll need to know how much space there is.”
Naomi put the cover carefully back into the lid. She didn’t ask whether Vera could fix it immediately. Vera liked her for that, then disliked herself a little for how grateful she was.
Jess wiped her hands on a towel. “I can help with the calls on the days I’m not at the store. Parts pickup, lifting, cleaning equipment. But I’ve got to be back for Naomi, and I need to be paid.”
“I wasn’t asking you to volunteer.”
“You haven’t asked me anything yet.”
They sat at the kitchen table after Naomi took her bell outside to watch the calf. Jess had worked delivery routes for six years and spent summers helping her grandfather repair farm machinery. She could read a parts drawing, drive a loaded van, and tell a customer when she didn’t know an answer.
Vera offered twenty-two dollars an hour for the help she needed. They agreed on written hours, Friday pay, and a stopping time that let Jess collect Naomi. Vera added the work to her business arrangements and called her insurer before they began regular service runs.
On their first morning, Jess came out of the house carrying two coffees. She reached for the truck’s passenger door and stopped when she saw the atlas, a folded canvas jacket, and a box of old parts spread across the seat. Vera took the coffee through the driver’s window.
“You’ll have to follow me today.”
Jess looked at the small load in the seat. “All right. Put my mileage on the sheet.”
Vera did, though it cost more than moving a box would have. At the bakery, Jess held the heavy cover while Vera checked the mixer’s drive assembly, then cleaned the accumulated flour from places Vera couldn’t reach with both hands occupied. They finished before the next batch of dough was needed.
The baker watched the mixer turn. “I thought this was going to be another week.”
Vera started to say she usually worked alone. Jess was closing the tool case beside her, and the sentence died before she spoke it. She wrote both women’s hours on the job sheet and carried the case out with Jess holding the other handle.
They ate lunch in the bakery parking lot. Jess had brought two sandwiches because Naomi had decided that morning she no longer liked the bread, and she offered Vera the one still wrapped. Vera took it and found herself explaining a shortcut through the next town that David used to insist was faster.
“Was it?” Jess asked.
“Not once. There was a hardware store on it.”
Jess smiled with her mouth full. Vera folded the sandwich paper into a small square and told her about the time they had bought a toilet plunger on that road and used it to retrieve a customer’s dropped measuring cup. She got the order of the stops wrong halfway through and corrected herself. Jess waited for the end without helping her make the story sad.
When they went back to work, Jess asked before taking a wrench from the case. Vera told her which drawer held the size she needed, then let her choose it. By the second job, they no longer had to negotiate every tool passed between them.
By Friday, the local calls had paid for feed, fuel, and Jess’s first twelve hours. Vera made the wage transfer before she paid herself. Jess checked her phone, thanked her, and left at the time they’d agreed.
Edith called that evening. The freezer door was still closing, she said, and Vera had left a screwdriver behind. She could collect it the next morning, if she had time to look at the shelter while she was there.
Vera arrived early enough to help Edith carry apples from the back room. They walked the field afterward, stopping where a fallen branch had bent the top wire. The shelter was dry, but the gate opening needed work and the trough had been disconnected.
“I’m not offering to take care of your cattle,” Edith said. “My hip won’t let me chase anything larger than the cat.”
“I can come every day.”
“Twice. And when you can’t, someone else has to.”
They stood looking through the open side of the shelter. Vera could picture Clover there, her head down in hay, with Otis out of the weather beside her. She kept her hands in her pockets so she wouldn’t start measuring before Edith finished.
Edith would consider a six-month lease on the field and shelter. Nine hundred dollars for the first six months, Vera’s feed and veterinary costs, and the damaged section of fence repaired before the animals came. They would write down who handled what, including water and winter access, and the veterinarian would need to be satisfied with the arrangement.
Beside the house was a small potting room with a workbench and a separate outside door. Edith had stopped raising seedlings for sale, though she still kept the room above freezing in winter. Vera noticed the deep shelves and the outlet beside the bench, then made herself return to the field they were discussing.
“After six months, we look at it again,” Edith said. “I might need to sell. I won’t promise you forever.”
Vera rubbed the screwdriver handle with her thumb. There was a place now, with a roof and a gate and a price. She asked Edith to hold it for a week while she worked out the rest.
Back at the farm, she drew a rough outline of the shelter on a clean sheet. Jess helped list the practical work and called a hay supplier she knew from the store. They added fencing materials, a stock tank, hauling, and feed until the total ran well beyond the rent.
Vera put Alan Voss’s number beside the page, then covered it with the calculator. She had already found work without selling the truck. She could find enough more.
Jess tapped the blank space beneath DAILY CHECKS. “Before you give her the deposit, whose name goes here when you’re forty miles away?”
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