"Twenty minutes, Wade." She met his eyes then, and her green eyes were bright and steady and something else he could not read, something that looked almost like defiance and almost like fear. "I'm asking you."
She folded the shirt over her arm, set the gloves on top of it, and carried them both out of the room with her, up the stairs, as if she did not trust him to be left alone with them.
He sat where she had left him. The lamp hummed. The fire, untended, began to settle into itself.
After a while he turned back to the desk, because he did not know what else to do with his hands, and he picked up the stack of invoices he had been working through. He had been going through them the way he always did, half his attention on the numbers and half on the drive home still running behind his eyes, initialing each one with a pencil when it looked right. They had all looked right. Now he went back to the beginning and read them again, the way you ride a fence line a second time after you've found one broken wire.
Hanson's Feed and Ranch Supply, Grass Range. Mineral tubs, two pallets. Fly tags. A case of Ivomec. Twine. And there, near the bottom of the August statement, a line he had passed his eyes over without seeing: GLOVE, ELK, MENS LG, 1 PR, $38.99. He did not wear a large. He wore an extra-large and always had, and Claire wore a women's medium, and the hired man they had in the summers, old Lyle Brekke, had retired to his daughter's place in Billings two years ago and had not been replaced, because they could not afford to replace him.
He found it again on the September statement. Another pair, same size. And a pair of Carhartt bibs, men's, thirty-two waist. And a set of insulated coveralls.
He set the Hanson's statement down and picked up the grocery receipts, which Claire kept in an envelope clipped to the back of the month's paperwork because he had asked her years ago to do that, because his father had taught him that a ranch that didn't know where its money went didn't stay a ranch. He had never looked at them closely. They were groceries. Now he saw that the August total at the IGA in Lewistown was almost two hundred dollars higher than August of the year before, and September was higher still. Ground beef in five-pound chubs. Two gallons of milk at a time. Frozen pizzas, which they did not eat, which Claire said were garbage. Three loaves of bread.
The water stopped running upstairs. He heard the soft murmur of Claire reading, the rise and fall of it, the voices she did for the characters. A man eats dinner in my house, he thought. A man who wears a thirty-two waist and a large glove, who leaves his shirt in my barn, whose name my daughter says like it belongs in her mouth.