The paper lost money. It was not a close thing. It had 1,640 subscribers at $38 and about thirty regular advertisers, it paid Ardith $31,000 a year, which I now believe was far too little, and it paid Hartley $4,000 every month to print sixteen pages and truck the bundles down. It came up short every month, and my grandfather made up the difference from what was meant to be his and my grandmother’s old age.
What was left in that account on the nineteenth of September was $38,100.
Gladys sat on a folding chair with her purse in her lap. I said, “Gran, how long does this last you, if you are careful?”
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“I have the house and the Social Security,” she said, “and I have what is in that book.”
I did the sum again, slowly, on the back of an envelope, and it came out to a few years. Three, perhaps four. Then she would need more help than she could pay for, and the person who would have to provide it was me.
I do not say that to excuse myself. I say it because it was the weight on my chest when the man from Sioux City called on the Monday after. His name was Reese Sutter, a pleasant man with a calm voice, the regional manager for a company that owned eleven weeklies. He offered $34,000 for the Beacon’s name and its subscriber list. The company did not want the building, the press or the people. It wanted 1,600 addresses for its paper in Orvale, forty miles away.
I asked him what would happen to the woman who ran the front office.
“Mrs. Sandvig? We’d lay out and sell from Sioux City and Orvale,” he said, kindly. “Her position wouldn’t carry over. We’d be glad to give her a reference.”
That was the sentence that should have stopped me. I want to say that plainly. I knew, on the twenty-second of September, in a restaurant in Orvale with a napkin in my lap, that the offer meant Ardith Sandvig would lose her job. I signed a one-page letter of intent on Friday the twenty-fifth, closing Monday the ninth of November. The last issue was to be Thursday the fifth.
My wife said, “Have you told her?”
“Monday,” I said. “I’ll do it in person.”
“How are you going to say it?”
“Straight,” I said. “I’ll be straight.”
Kristen looked at me for a while over Bailey’s head. “Say what you are afraid of,” she said, “not what you think she is.”
I did not know what she meant. I drove up on Monday morning rehearsing a sentence.