Then he went to the feed room, because it was the only place left, and because when he was a boy his father had kept a coffee can on the top shelf over the grain bin where he hid cash and his good pocketknife and anything else he did not want Wade's mother to know about. Wade had never told Claire about the can. He reached up and felt along the shelf and it was not there. In its place, pushed to the back, was a red metal cash box, the kind they sold at the hardware store, unlocked. Inside it was a spiral notebook, a pencil, and nothing else.
He opened the notebook. It was Claire's handwriting. He would have known it anywhere: the round, upright, schoolteacher's hand that had written him notes in his lunch sack for thirteen years. Down the left margin of each page she had written dates. Next to each date was a number of hours. Next to that, a dollar figure, always fifteen dollars an hour. And down the right side of the page, a running balance, which got smaller.
At the top of the first page it said, in that same hand: D. — $7,500.
The first date was July 2. The balance after it was $7,455. The dates went on through July and August and September, three hours here and six there and a ten-hour day on a Saturday in August when he had been in Dillon, and the balance dropped page by page, and on the last line, dated Tuesday of this week, when he had been in a motel room in Billings eating takeout chicken and calling home to say goodnight, it said 4 hrs, $60, and the balance was $1,140.
Seven thousand five hundred dollars.
He sat down on a bag of rolled oats with the notebook open in his lap. His first thought, his rational thought, was that she had told him the truth: he owes something, and he's working it off. But the rational thought did not last. Seven thousand five hundred dollars was not a debt a seventeen-year-old boy ran up. What did a boy owe a ranch wife seven and a half thousand dollars for? And why was she keeping the books on it herself, in a cash box in the barn, in the hiding place he had thought nobody alive knew about but him? D. A man named D who owed her, or was owed by her—and that was the other way it could be read, wasn't it, the column of figures counting down—a man she was paying, or paying off, or paying for something.
He heard a vehicle door slam up at the house and jumped like a guilty man. He put the notebook back in the cash box and the cash box back on the shelf exactly as he had found it, pushed to the back, and went to the barn door.
Claire was in the yard in her barn coat, with her phone pressed to her ear, walking in a tight circle by the pickup. She had not come out to do chores; she had come out to make a call where he could not hear it. As he watched, she took the phone from her ear and looked at it and said something he could not make out, and pressed the screen and put it to her ear again. Then she lowered it and stood with her head bent over it, typing with her thumb. Then she looked up and saw him in the barn door.