Other nights, she ate crackers standing beside the sink because preparing a proper dinner seemed pointless.
The neighbors tried to help.
A retired mechanic who had known Walter for thirty years brought spare tractor parts.
A woman from the local agricultural cooperative delivered groceries.
Several church members repaired the fence near the eastern boundary.
Dileia appreciated the kindness.
But each act reminded her that her father was gone.
She had spent years imagining she would return home and build the farm with him.
Now the farm was hers.
Every decision.
Every bill.
Every broken machine.
Every acre of stubborn ground.
And every morning, she woke knowing that one mistake might erase the life Walter had worked to create.
She started by reviewing his financial records.
The situation was worse than she'd feared.
The land had significant agricultural value, but its cash flow had deteriorated through several poor growing seasons.
The operating loan had been renewed repeatedly.
Equipment financing remained outstanding.
And the mortgage payments depended on seasonal income that hadn't arrived.
Walter had continued investing in the black-root crop because he believed the experimental work was approaching a breakthrough.
But laboratories moved slowly.
Commercial partnerships required testing.
And the farm couldn't pay its bills with promising correspondence.
Dileia took a temporary job assisting with inventory at a regional agricultural equipment supplier.
She worked three days a week.
Then returned to the farm to manage irrigation, repairs, and harvesting.
During planting season, she slept four or five hours a night.
She learned how to rebuild hydraulic fittings.
How to negotiate fuel deliveries.
How to determine which fields could be left fallow without damaging future cultivation plans.
And how to explain to creditors that she intended to pay them even when her checking account suggested otherwise.
The people at the bank were not all hostile.
One loan officer spent hours reviewing options with her.
He explained repayment schedules, required documentation, and the consequences of missing deadlines.
He didn't promise relief he couldn't authorize.
But he treated her respectfully.
Another representative was less patient.
He suggested selling an acreage parcel.
Then selling equipment.
Then selling the entire farm.
Dileia listened to every option.
She wasn't foolish enough to assume determination could replace income.
But she also knew something about the land that outsiders didn't.
Its experimental crop was the result of decades of work.
Its surviving plant population had been selected through repeated seasons of extreme heat, limited water, and difficult soil.
And the underground roots represented an agricultural resource Walter had never fully harvested.