"Outside of Lexington. My father ran a small farm." She straightened and looked at the plot. Henry and I met there. He had his workshop in town, and I used to bring things in to be repaired. She paused.
The first time he fixed a broken chair leg for me, he told me exactly what he had done wrong the first time and why the second way was better. Most men would not have said that. Why not? Because it meant admitting they had tried something that didn't work. She looked at him.
He thought that was useful information for me. He thought I should know how the thing actually worked, not just that it worked. Amos was quiet for a moment. There was something in his face she had been seeing in traces for weeks that she was now standing in better light in better circumstances, able to see more clearly. It was not sympathy, which she had received plenty of and found mostly useless.
It was something more like recognition. "I'm sorry he didn't get to see this," he said simply without ceremony. No performance of compassion around it. She looked at him to check for the performance and found none, which was the most disarming response he could have given. "So am I," she said.
They stood for a moment in the afternoon light with nothing requiring either of them to speak, and it was not uncomfortable, which she noted. I can send Tommy over with a window frame, Amos said eventually. We've got old glass at the ranch pulled from a structure we tore down last fall. Good glass, no cracks. It would fit a 12x6 frame.
She looked at her oiled paper window. How much? She said. The glass cost me nothing. I'd have used it eventually or left it to rot.
He shrugged and it was a genuine shrug, not a performance of casualness. I'd rather it goes in a window. She was quiet for a moment, weighing it, weighing him. All right, she said. Tell Tommy the rough opening is 15 by 17.
He'll need to bring the frame already cut. Something crossed his face then, small and quickly gone, but she caught it. It looked like relief. I'll tell him, he said. He left the way he came along the creek line and she watched him go and thought about the look on his face when she said yes and decided she was not going to think about what it meant right now because the garden needed water and the west slope needed attention and she had better uses for her thinking than speculating about the internal states of her nearest neighbor.