Squash, beans, a variety of corn that a woman at one of the neighboring ranches had said did well in this soil. She had plans for a second garden bed on the north side of the cabin where the different light would extend the harvest season by 2 or 3 weeks. She had plans for a root cellar dug into the slope below the cabin, which would extend the storage season through the following winter. She had plans, plural, extending into the future in a way that plans had not extended 8 months ago, when the future had been 60 days and then nothing. And she had trained herself not to look past 60 days, because looking past 60 days was a luxury she could not afford.
She could afford it now. The land was hers. The determination papers were in the box under the cot with Henry's tools and the original claim document and Cole's witness statement and the three photographs that she had looked at for a long time the night Garrett gave them to her and had not been able to be entirely angry about because they were good photographs and they were true and the truth of them had won her something she was not going to be able to resent. She had repaid the legal fee to Amos in March on the schedule she had set from the sewing income that had been steadier through the winter than she had projected. She had written the final payment amount on a piece of paper and handed it to him with the same formality with which she had handed him the original loan terms, and he had taken it with the same seriousness, and they had both understood that the transaction was not only about money.
"We're<unk> square," she said. "We're<unk> square," he agreed. Neither of them said anything else about it because there was nothing else to say about it. And because being square on the money meant the thing between them had nothing financial attached to it anymore, which was what she had needed it to mean before she could look at the rest of it directly. Amos came that first warm afternoon of spring.
And for the first time since November, he stopped at the creek before coming up to the cabin. She watched him from the window standing at the water and she understood what he was doing because she had done it herself that morning. Taking stock of what had made it through and what condition it was in. He stood there for a while and then he came up the rise and knocked on the door that stood open already because she had opened it to let the first warm air in. The creeks running clear, he said.
It has been for a week, she said. Sit down. I made actual food. What counts as actual food? Beans and cornbread," she said.
"As opposed to the dried situation we've both been surviving on since December, he sat." Young Henry was in the high chair that Amos had brought in February. Built himself, the joinery careful and considered, "The kind of work that took time and thought. Not the kind of thing you bought at a store, and not the kind of thing you built quickly." She had not commented on the joinery when he brought it. He had not asked her to. They ate at the table she had built across from each other with young Henry between them in the high chair working very seriously on a piece of softened bread.
The spring light came through the glass window and the sound of the creek came through the open door and the whole uncomplicated fact of two people eating a meal together. At the end of a long winter settled into the room like something that had always been there and had only been waiting for the right conditions to be visible. I want to add a room, she said. He looked up. On the west side, she said, "Not this year, maybe, but I've been thinking about the design.