I'll show you someday, Vivien said. When the time is right. Elsie considered this with great seriousness. Then she said, "Okay. " And took Vivian's hand with the absolute trust that children extend, and adults spend their whole lives learning not to, and led her toward the front door of the house, as though they had always known each other. Gideon stood in the yard and watched this, and felt something he didn't have a clean name for move through him.
The house was what it was. It kept it functional and not much more. Clean enough, warm enough, practical in every way it needed to be. Clara's few decorative touches were long gone, put away somewhere he didn't have to look at them, replaced by the sparse logic of a man who lived alone with a small child and had no patience for anything that didn't serve a purpose. He watched Viven take it in when she walked through the door, watched her read the rooms in the way a perceptive person reads a space.
The kitchen with its heavy iron stove. The main room with its worn furniture arranged around warmth rather than conversation. The single window with its view of the barn. The shelf above the fireplace with its three books. And Elsie's collection of smooth stones and one small cloth doll with button eyes.
She didn't make any comment about the house. Didn't try to arrange her features into appreciation. She didn't feel didn't say anything polite and hollow about it being cozy or having good bones. She walked through it and she looked. And when she came back to the kitchen, she said, "What time does she eat supper? " "6," he said.
"When she'll cooperate. What does she like? " "Anything with sweetness in it. She'll eat around vegetables if she can manage it. " Viven nodded like she was filing this away. I'll start learning the kitchen tomorrow. Tonight, I don't want to get in your way.
He hadn't expected that kind of restraint. Most people in a new situation tried to be useful immediately to establish themselves and usually made more trouble than they solved. "That's fine," he said. She nodded and moved toward the small room off the kitchen that he told her in the letter would be hers until, well, until whatever arrangements needed to be made were made. The letter had been careful about that.
He'd explained that the agreement from the agency didn't obligate either of them to anything they weren't comfortable with. She could stay through the winter and leave in spring if she wanted. He wasn't going to hold her to anything. He'd written that paragraph three times. He still wasn't sure he'd gotten it right.
At the door to the small room, she paused. The trunk, she said. I'll need it brought in before tonight. I'll get it. It needs to stay in my room.