Then she pulled herself up into the wagon bed. The crates shifted under her weight and the whole rig moved in a way she didn't like, but she got her footing and began lifting pots through the slats and passing them down to the road one at a time. Rushing would crack more of them. She went carefully and steadily and did not look at the ones she was setting down to count the damage, because counting now would not help anything. She had been doing this for about ten minutes when she heard a horse on the road behind her.
Silas Ward reined up and looked at the situation without saying anything for a moment. "I followed at a distance," he said finally. "The road after the fork can be rough." "It was," she said, and kept working. He looked at the wheel, at the angle of the wagon, at his horse.
He made a decision without much ceremony about it. He tied a rope from his saddle to the wagon frame above the trapped wheel and looked at her.
"Keep unloading. I'll hold tension on the frame. When it's light enough, tell me. What's the signal?"
"Say 'now'." They worked like that for close to an hour. She moved pots. He held the frame steady with his horse so the wagon wouldn't settle further while the load shifted. They said almost nothing.
There was nothing particularly useful to say in the middle of a problem, and they were both people who understood that. When the load was down far enough, Evie said, "Now." Silas put his horse into it and the wheel came up out of the channel with a jolt that shook the whole rig. She grabbed the side rail and held on.
Then she climbed down and went immediately to the pots she'd set along the road and began going through them with both hands, lifting, turning, running her thumb along the surfaces, setting the cracked ones apart. Silas watched from horseback. He did not offer to help count. He seemed to understand that this was not the kind of task she wanted company in. The final number was seventeen.
Seventeen pots with cracks deep enough to make them useless as irrigation vessels. She stood in the road looking at them, and she felt the loss the way you feel a physical thing, not in her throat or her eyes, but lower down in the place where you hold the things, you can't afford to lose. Seventeen pots at roughly fifteen cents each was not a sum that would ruin her. What it changed was the math. She had bought 300 because 300 was what the grid required.
Seventeen short was a gap she would either leave in the system or redesign around. She sat down on the wagon's running board and opened the ledger. "Do you need to rest?" Silas said, not looking at her, still on his horse.