Page 86

***

“You can’t count the full fifteen hundred.”

Priya tapped the haulage sheet with her pen.

I looked across the table. “It’s a fifteen-hundred-gallon tank.”

“It also leaks at the intake, and we haven’t verified the gauge. Until we do, we use the volume we can document.”

“Naturally. Wouldn’t want the tank exaggerating on its résumé.”

Her eyes stayed on the page.

I let the joke die without trying to revive it.

Outside the west window, the last daylight lay across the yard. Nine at night, and Montana still hadn’t quite admitted the day was over. The bunkhouse smelled of dish soap and the dust our boots had carried in.

My supper plate stood drying beside hers.

She’d eaten at the table tonight. Not much, but sitting down.

I had managed not to make that a ceremony.

“The cycle time includes filling,” she said. “Travel, discharge, return. Not just the fifty-three minutes we recorded.”

“Right.”

“And if we haul from an alternative supply, the travel changes.”

“Depends where.”

“Yes.”

She drew a line under the assumption.

I leaned forward.

“What if we put the creek figure on its own sheet? Keep it separate from whatever hauled supply we can confirm.”

Her pen stopped.

Then she nodded.

“That would make the comparison clearer.”

I reached for a blank page before I could do anything embarrassing with the approval.

We worked.

Or she worked and I asked enough questions that I eventually understood what I was looking at. There was satisfaction in that, the plain kind. Numbers that meant gallons. Minutes that meant an actual truck taking an actual road. Not a vague estimate I could sweeten until it sounded possible.

She slid the sheet toward me.

“Show me how you got that.”

I pointed with my pencil.

She followed the calculation. Her mouth moved once, silently.