She said it evenly without force, but with a precision that made clear it was not a point of preference, but a point of requirement. I'll sleep better knowing it's there. He looked at her. She looked back. "All right," he said.
She went into the room and closed the door, and he stood in the kitchen for a moment in the particular silence of a house that had recently added a person to it, and hadn't quite settled around the addition yet. He got his coat and went outside to drag the trunk in. Set the first week was what he'd expected, and also nothing like what he'd expected. What he'd expected was difficulty. He'd assumed she wouldn't know how to do things, and she didn't.
Not any of the specific physical things that running a frontier ranch required, not the rhythm of it, not the brute labor of keeping alive in November at elevation with bad weather coming. He'd expected to have to show her things, and he did. What he hadn't expected was the quality of her attention when he did. He showed her how to handle the cook stove, the particular violence of it, the way it needed to be fed and managed rather than simply operated. And she listened with the complete focus of someone learning a foreign language who knows their life depends on getting it right.
She made a mistake the next morning that filled the kitchen with smoke. And she didn't apologize for it or make excuses for it. She opened the door, studied what had gone wrong, and didn't make the same mistake again. He showed her the chickens and the cow, which were her responsibility in the mornings. The cow, whose name was Agnes, and whose temperament was consistently uncharitable, kicked at her twice the first morning.
Most people would have flinched back and been timid with the animal after that. Viven stood there for a moment, seemed to make some internal decision, and went back to the task with the same patience she'd been using before. Agnes didn't kick a third time. "She'll test you every morning until she decides you belong here," Gideon told her, watching from the barn door. "She's not the only one," Vivien said, not looking up from what she was doing.
He didn't have an answer to that, so he didn't give one. The neighbors came on the fourth day, Marta Hollings and her husband Dale from the next spread over 6 milesi east, which counted as close out here. They came with a covered dish and the transparent excuse of welcoming Viven, which was to say they came to look at her. Marta was not a malicious woman, but she had a face that filtered every new thing through a permanent skepticism, and she ran that filter over Viven with the thoroughess of a customs inspector. You're from Philadelphia, Marta said, sitting at the kitchen table with her coffee and her covered dish.
It had the sound of an accusation. I am, Vivien said. Long way to come for a ranch in Montana. It is. Most women who come out from the east, Marta paused in the careful way of someone selecting a word that communicates what they mean without technically being rude.
Find it's not quite what they'd hoped. I haven't hoped for anything in particular, Vivien said. I've only planned to be useful. Martya looked at her. Dale looked at the table.