It was enough. It was, in fact, more than she had expected to have. Winter arrived the way winter arrives at altitude. Not gradually, not with warning, not with the courtesy of a gradual transition. One morning, Clare awoke, and the world had made a decision about itself, and there was nothing to do but adapt.
She had been preparing for it since September with the methodical attention she gave to everything that mattered, which by now included almost everything on the property. The firewood was stacked three cords deep along the east wall. The food stores were in the preserving jars on the shelf. The remaining wall gaps had been re-chanked with fresh clay and dried moss before the ground froze. She had put a second layer of insulation under the floorboards where the cold came up from the mountain earth in the particular silent way of cold that has been waiting all year for its turn.
The cabin was warm, not lavishly warm. She kept the fire lower than she would have liked to preserve wood through the long months ahead, but warm enough and dry, which was what the structure had been built to be, and what it proved itself to be every morning when she woke, and the roof was still solid, and the floor was still dry and young. Henry was still breathing with the total committed unconsciousness of a healthy infant who has no opinion about the weather outside. Amos came three times a week now. He came in the front way as he had said he would, and he did not pretend he had other reasons for being there.
He fixed things when there were things to fix, and there were always things to fix in a structure built under time pressure by a person learning as she went. And he sat at the table she had built when there was nothing to fix, and they talked, or they did not talk, and both were easy in the specific way that things are easy between people who have stopped performing for each other. He replaced the chinking on the north wall where it had cracked in the first hard freeze. He reinforced the lean to roof where one of the supporting poles had developed a lean that would have become a collapse under serious snow load. He looked at her work each time he came, not with the assessing eye of someone checking whether she had done things correctly, but with the quieter attention of someone who had watched something be built from nothing, and had not yet stopped being interested in it.
One afternoon in November, he looked at the chair joints she had known were substandard since the day she built them, and he said carefully, "Do you want me to?" "Yes," she said. "But I want to watch how you do it," he nodded. He did not say anything about the fact that this was how she asked for everything. Not the thing itself, but the knowledge of the thing, so that the next time she would not have to ask. He had figured that out somewhere in the previous months and had stopped finding it unusual.
They sat on the floor together with the chair upside down between them. And he showed her the joint, where it had failed and why, and what the correct cut would have looked like. And she listened with the full attention she gave to anything she intended to remember. Then she did the second chair herself while he held the work steady, and when it was done, and she said it right side up and sat in it, and it did not shift. [snorts] Something passed across her face that she did not try to name. "Your husband taught you well," he said.
I taught myself, she said. He provided the education. There's a difference. Amos was quiet for a moment. Fair point, he said.