Eleven years had turned the debt into a drawer. I kept the notices in a shoebox under my desk, four of them by June 2020, each one a few pages of court-appointed numbers explaining what a distressed estate could and could not pay back. The second notice had covered maybe a third of Inez's eleven thousand. The third and fourth less than that, in smaller print, as the assets ran thinner.
"That's not nothing," Inez said, when I handed her the fourth notice across the folding table she now used as her desk, in the propagation house she no longer worked for me but rented from me. She'd gone independent in 2015, Calder Seedlings stenciled on a sign I'd helped her hang, paying me by the bench for space and water instead of drawing a paycheck.
"It's not everything either," I said. "Forty-one hundred dollars recovered against eleven thousand owed, over four distributions and nine years. At this rate you'll have the rest back around the time I'm buried."
She didn't laugh at that, just set the notice down and looked at me the way she had in 2009, patient, unimpressed by my talent for turning arithmetic into despair. "I didn't ask you for a joke, Everett. I asked you four years ago for a plan, and I don't think I ever got one."
I'd heard that morning, on the radio while mixing feed for the early trays, that a judge had denied Celia Dacre's request for compassionate release. Eighty years old, by the report, some illness named in the filing, and the court had said no, the sentence stands, she serves it as handed down in 2009.
I told Inez about it over coffee, half expecting the news to land as a kind of closing bracket, the system finishing what it started, and I think some small ungenerous part of me wanted her to hear it that way too, so the ledger between us could finally rest.
"Good," Inez said, not looking up from the tray she was thinning. "I hope she serves every day of it. It doesn't touch what you owe me, if that's where you're headed."
"I wasn't trying to say that."
"You were circling it," she said, setting down her thinning scissors. "You do that. Something happens in her case, and you get this look like maybe it settles something over here too. It doesn't. She's in prison because of what she did. You and I are still working out what you're going to do about what you did, which was tell me to trust her with my savings. Those aren't the same account."
I wanted to argue that I'd never asked for the sentence to count as payment, but sitting with her words a moment I understood she'd caught something true in me before I'd let myself see it. The size of a punishment had nothing to do with the size of a debt. I'd known that in 2009. I'd apparently needed reminding in 2020.
"Forty-one hundred in," I said instead, pulling out a legal pad, trying to be the version of myself that made lists instead of excuses. "Sixty-nine hundred to go, at whatever rate the fund manages going forward, which nobody can promise me."
"That's the money," Inez said. "I'm not only talking about the money anymore, Everett. I've built something here, on your benches, with your water and your roof. I'm fifty-four years old. I need to know you're not going to sell this ground out from under me the day it's inconvenient to keep me in mind."
I looked past her at the long rows under the glass, rows I'd kept standing through two recessions and one divorce and more winters of propane debt than I liked to count, rows that were, by then, as much Inez's work as mine. "I don't have a plan for that either," I admitted. "But I hear the question different than I did ten minutes ago."
"Then get one," she said. "Not someday. Before I have to find out the hard way, same as I found out about Dacre Meridian." She went back to her trays, and I sat with the shoebox of thin little recoveries and the much larger thing she'd just asked me to be honest about, and neither of us said anything else that afternoon that needed saying.