When I turned to go, she said my name, "Caleb." And I turned back. She said, "For what it's worth, you have a well-kept place." I said it was mostly him. She said she doubted that.
I left her to it. I want to say something here that's hard to say without it sounding like I had a plan, because I didn't. I sat up in the kitchen that night after Denton had gone to bed, and I sat there with the lamp turned low, and I thought about what it costs a woman to do what she'd done, right to a stranger. Pack whatever she owned into a trunk, ride a stage across country to a town she'd never seen, walk into a strange house and drink coffee that was going cold because she was too well-mannered to refuse it, and too honest to pretend she wanted it. And then have the stranger's brother tell her, as kindly as one person can tell another, that she wasn't what he'd expected.
I thought about N. Voss, the woman who wrote in a plain hand and hoped the accommodations were comfortable, and the woman with the jaw set just a little too tight sitting at my kitchen table. Same woman holding herself together. I didn't make a plan. I sat in the kitchen and I thought about the east fence and the north barn door, and about 43 years of being the one who fixed what Denton broke, and I thought, "No, not this one.
Not her." In the morning I had the coffee on by 5:30. I heard her up at 6:00, heard the floorboard in the spare room that talks, heard her at the pump. She came in and I handed her a cup without a word, and she took it and stood by the window, and we watched the sky go from black to gray to a thin cold pink over the ridge. The stove ticked and popped.
At some point I said, "What was in Pueblo?" She said, "A job teaching at a church school that doesn't pay enough to live on. Before that, Kansas City. Before that, Illinois." She said it like she was reading from a document.
I said, "What are you good at?" She looked at me not surprised, but considering, like the question was different from what she'd been expecting. She said, "I can keep a set of accounts. I can put up vegetables. I can set a bone if someone holds the patient still.
I taught school for 3 years." She paused. I don't frighten easily. I said, "No." I didn't think you did.
She kept her eyes on me. They were level and serious and something else. She was reading me the way she'd have read a land survey, methodically, not skipping anything. I felt it, that reading. I felt it in a way I hadn't felt looked at in a long time, maybe ever.
I said, "The stage doesn't have to go to Pueblo." She was very still. I said, "I'm not Denton." I said it plainly, not as an apology for him and not as a recommendation for myself. Just the fact of it, same as the north door.