Chapter 2: Jennifer

Jennifer stared up at the pissed-off farmer, towering over her, and had the most vivid – if short – daydream of stomping into his instep, kneeing him in the balls, and walking out the door. With that, she could go back to her boss, tell him that the farm had failed the audit and that the Miller Farm needed to be repossessed for lack of assets and income. It's what her boss wanted her to report back, anyway. Jenn knew that.

But she pushed down her urge to knock the asshole of a farmer down a peg or two, and instead forced a smile onto her face. An unconvincing, stiff-as-dried-plaster smile, but a smile nonetheless.

"Thank you for the information. Now, if you wouldn't mind, I have work to do, since it appears none has been done in months." She stared pointedly at a particularly precarious pile of file folders tottering on the edge of the desk and then back up at Mr. Miller.

Waaaay up at Mr. Miller. Dammit all, this guy was a giant. Were all Sawyer farm boys this tall? She was going to hurt her neck, craning it like this.

Not that she was going to admit that to this overgrown ape. She'd already had her fill of his condescending attitude and she'd only been in his presence for three minutes. She'd admit a weakness to him about the same time she'd chop off her right foot.

And anyway, it sure as hell wasn't her fault that her father wasn't cousin to Bigfoot.

"Whatever. I have work to do. Real work." He stomped past her and out into the hallway, his footsteps echoing with anger as he stormed out of the house.

Jennifer turned back to the portly older woman still hovering in the doorway, and shot her a more genuine smile. "Thanks for your help," she said.

"My Stetson should not have behaved that way," Carmelita announced angrily, her cheeks a flaming red. "I will have a talk with him when he comes back in about his manners." She too stormed down the hallway but her soft slippers didn't clomp nearly as loudly as Mr. Miller's boots had. Jennifer somehow knew that Carmelita was regretting her shoe choices that very moment.

Jennifer turned back to the office, surveying it with a groan. She'd audited some pretty disastrous offices before on behalf of the bank, but she was pretty sure that this one took the cake. In stark contrast to the rest of the pristine house that Jennifer had caught sight of as she'd followed Carmelita back here, this disaster zone really looked like it just deserved to be set on fire so they could start over again.

Why was it that offices run by men always looked like this? When women were the bookkeepers, the offices may not have been spick-n-span, but they were at least tolerable. But men's offices...it was like they were allergic to filing paperwork. Or cleaning.

Which was, of course, why the bank was sending her out to audit the books to begin with. People who were on top of their paperwork and their filing and their bills didn't tend to have their businesses taken away from them. That wasn't always true, of course – sometimes a business ran into a string of bad luck that couldn't be avoided – but usually, it was a hatred and/or a complete lack of bookkeeping knowledge that put people into this position.

She sighed. She knew from hard-won experience that getting grumpy about the state of an office at the beginning of an audit did her absolutely no good. It was time to get to work. She could complain about farmers' inability to file papers into a drawer later over wine with Bonnie.

Just as Jennifer moved to sit down in the rickety old office chair that looked like it'd survived a WWII bombing raid, she heard the front door slam open, footsteps echo through the entryway and hallway, and then Mr. Miller reappeared in the doorway, his face as brilliant red as Carmelita's had been. Avoiding eye contact, he snatched his cowboy hat off the filing cabinet in the corner – Jennifer hadn't even noticed it in amongst the piles of papers everywhere – shoved it down on his head, and then stormed back out, the door slamming shut behind him.

Again.

She wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.

She sat down in the office chair with a snort-laugh that ended with a yelp of terror when she found herself staring up at the ceiling, her head cracking against the hardwood floor as the chair slammed backwards. "What the hell?!" she half-yelled, the words coming out of her before she could stop them. She usually tried not to swear at a customer's place of business, but she also usually did not sit in chairs that fell over like fainting goats, either, so she figured she had a valid excuse just this once.

She rocked and rolled and finally heaved herself out of the chair and onto her feet, staring down at the innocent-looking chair with a baleful glare. She brushed her black skirt off, trying to get the bits of hay and mud and cow shit off her from her roll on the floor. That was definitely not how she wanted to start this audit. With a sigh, she hoisted the ancient office chair upright again, settling down into it gingerly this time, finding just the right spot to keep her precarious balance.

Yup, this was gonna be one fun audit, all right.