The Bookkeeper Across the Tracks

Two Weeks

Cindy came in the next morning at seven sharp, in a pressed blouse and good slacks, carrying a new spiral notebook and three sharpened pencils. Nobody wears good slacks in an elevator office. I didn’t tell her that.

“Where do you want me?” she asked.

“Pull up that chair,” I said. “We’ll start with the scale tickets. Everything starts with the scale tickets.”

I showed her how a ticket works. The truck pulls on loaded and you take the gross weight. It dumps at the pit and pulls back on empty and you take the tare.

The difference is the net, and the net is what the farmer gets paid on, minus whatever comes off.

“What comes off?” she asked.

“Moisture, mostly,” I said. “Beans want to be thirteen percent. If they come in wetter than that, we shrink them, because they’ll lose that weight drying anyway. Then there’s foreign material and splits. Then test weight, if it’s light.”

She wrote all of it down. Every word. Her handwriting was small and slanted and very neat, the handwriting of a woman who had filled out a lot of forms in her life.

On the second day I showed her settlement sheets and the price contracts, which farmer had sold forward and at what price, who wanted to store and who wanted a check.

On the third day I showed her the daily position report.

“This is the one that will get you,” I told her. “At the end of every day, what came in and what went out has to match what’s in the bins. To the bushel. If it doesn’t, you find out why before you go home.”

“What if I can’t find out why?”

“Then you stay until you do,” I said. “Joan used to say the bins don’t lie. People do, and pencils do, but the bins don’t.”

Cindy stopped writing. “Joan,” she said. “That was his first wife.”

“She taught me all of this,” I said. “Sat right where you’re sitting.”

Cindy looked down at the chair like it might belong to someone else. Then she went back to her notebook, and she didn’t say anything else for most of the afternoon.

I won’t pretend I was a saint those two weeks. There were mornings I came in with my stomach in a knot.

There was one afternoon I went out to my car at lunch and sat there with the windows up and cried for ten minutes, and then fixed my face and went back in.

But I taught her right. I taught her the way Joan taught me, slow and in order, with the hard parts twice.

I would not have been able to live with myself any other way. That office was my work, even if it was not going to be my desk.