Not impressively. Right. She held his eyes. Henry used to say that. She said almost exactly that.
Build it right and it lasts. Cut corners and it becomes someone else's problem. He was right. Amos said he was right about a lot of things. She said he was occasionally wrong too.
He would want me to say that for accuracy. Amos looked at young Henry, who had finished his bread and was now applying his considerable focus to the problem of the high chair tray, which he appeared to be testing for structural integrity. He looks like him, Amos said. More every week, she said. The eyes especially.
You'll see it clearer in a year. I'd like a year, Amos said. She looked at him. He looked back. There was no performance left in either of them, which was the thing she had not known she was waiting for.
Not the moment when things were sad, but the moment when there was nothing left to perform. When two people were just themselves in a room with their losses and their histories and their capable hands, and the room was enough, and the person across the table was enough, and the life being built was enough. I'm not the same woman I was when Henry died, she said. She needed him to believe things were possible before she could believe it herself. I don't need that anymore.
I built the believing the same way I built the cabin. From scratch, on my own terms, one thing at a time. I know, he said. I'm not looking for what he was, she said. I'm not looking to replace what I had.
I'm looking. She stopped and found the word forward. I am looking forward, which is something I didn't know I was going to be able to do again. Amos was quiet for a long moment. Outside the creek ran in the first real warmth of the year, and a bird she had been hearing all morning without identifying, called from the timber on the north boundary, and young Henry made a sound of general satisfaction with the tray, having apparently determined its structural integrity was adequate.