We did the crop test on the eleventh, a Saturday so cold the thermometer outside the propagation-house door read nineteen degrees before sunrise. Inside, the boiler was already working hard. I brought three years of actual order sheets instead of the seed catalogs I'd been tempted to lean on. Inez spread her own ledger beside mine on the potting table, weighted down against the draft with a pair of pruning shears, and said we were going to run every number against what people had actually bought, not what they might buy if the weather behaved.
"Start with February," she said. "Not the good February. The one from 2022, when the propane truck couldn't get up the hill for four days." I pulled the invoice from that stretch, the number still sour in my memory, and set it against her projected tomato starts. The margin thinned fast. She didn't flinch, just wrote it down.
We went through March the same way, then the cost of the replacement glazing panels Beckett Packing's supplier had quoted her independently, then the interest on the balance I'd be carrying if she financed part of the purchase through me instead of a bank that wanted collateral she didn't yet have. Every column she built had a worse year sitting inside it on purpose.
"I keep wanting to tell you it'll be fine," I said, somewhere past ten o'clock, watching her erase a profit figure and replace it with a smaller one. "That you'll make the payments easy, that the roof will hold, that I could write you a floor under it so you'd never lose a season's wage over my glass." I meant it as comfort. I heard it land as something else.
Inez set the pencil down flat on the table, which she did only when she wanted me to stop and listen instead of talk. "Don't," she said. "Don't guarantee me a minimum profit, Everett. That's the same promise in a cleaner coat." I started to object that this was different, a business term and not a reassurance, and she shook her head before I finished the sentence.
"You told me once that your money would always beat the market down at Dacre Meridian," she said. "You believed it. I believed it because you did. I'm not doing that again, on either side of the table. I want the real numbers, including the ones where I lose a crop to a bad April, not a promise dressed up to make the risk disappear." The cold in the greenhouse felt less like weather then and more like a kind of honesty I hadn't earned the right to soften.
I asked her what she wanted instead, and she told me plainly: a lower purchase price, low enough that a bad year wouldn't sink her before she'd built a reserve; a written repair fund held separate for the boiler and roofline problems the walk-through had turned up five days before; and a seller-financed balance on terms a real accountant would check before either of us signed anything.
"No guarantees from you," she said. "Just honest terms and somebody independent reading them before I put my name on the page." I wrote the numbers down the way she dictated them, two hundred sixty thousand instead of the two-eighty I'd offered, a repair reserve of eleven thousand held in escrow, financing on the remainder at a rate she'd have her own advisor review.
It was less money than I'd hoped to walk away with, and it was, I realized somewhere in the writing of it, the first figure in this whole long business that hadn't been built to make either of us feel better than the facts allowed. We signed nothing that morning. We shook hands over the ledger, which in that cold room felt like more than paper would have.
Before I left, she looked at the stack of propane invoices still spread across the table, years of them, mine and now soon to be hers, and said the thing that stayed with me longest. "This isn't going to fix what happened in 2008," she said. "I need you to know I understand that, going in. It's just a business, Everett. A fair one, I hope. That's all either of us gets to call it."