"I'm not asking you for anything you're not ready to give," Amos said. I've never been asking that. I know, she said. That's one of the things I noticed first. He looked at the drawing she had set back on the table.
The addition, the new room, the plans that extended into the future that had been 60 days and was now something longer, something with more rooms in it, more seasons, more mornings of coffee, and the sound of the creek, and a child growing up in a cabin his mother built from nothing. The mason's name is Albi, Amos said again. He'll want to start by checking the soil himself before he'll commit to anything. And he'll explain why in more detail than you asked for. I'll ask him to explain it, she said.
I want to know why. I know you do, he said. Young Henry chose that moment to announce his opinion that the meal had concluded and that whoever was responsible for the next portion of his morning should attend to the matter promptly. They both looked at him. He looked at both of them with the absolute authority of a person who has not yet learned that he is small.
Clara picked him up and he settled against her shoulder with the complete satisfaction of a person who has accomplished what he set out to accomplish. She looked at him, 6 months old, with his father's dark eyes and his mother's particular quality of attention, looking at the world the way she had always looked at it, as if it was a problem that could be solved if you were patient enough to find all the joints. Your father would have loved this spring, she told him. He would have already had opinions about the garden layout. She looked at Amos.
He always had opinions about layout. He sounds like someone I would have liked, Amos said. He was, she said. He was exactly someone you would have liked. In May, when the ground was dry enough, Amos came with Albi and they set the stone peers for the addition.
Albi was, as promised, entirely certain of his own skill, and entirely willing to explain exactly why in detail, beginning with the moment he arrived, and did not stop until the peers were set, and he was satisfied that she understood the depth requirements and the reasoning behind them, which she did, because she had asked every question and listened to every answer. Good craftsman understands another good craftsman, Albi said when she asked him to explain why the corner peers needed to go 6 in deeper than the interior ones. My husband was a Finnish carpenter, she said. Then you know how this works, he said with the satisfaction of a man whose theory has been confirmed. Tommy came for the excavation and young Henry watched from a blanket in the clearing with the focused critical attention of a person taking notes he intended to use later.
At 7 months he was sitting up on his own and treating every aspect of the construction with a seriousness that she found despite herself moving. He had inherited the habit of looking. She did not know where else it would have come from. By August, the addition was framed and roofed, and she was doing the interior finish work herself, the way she had done the original cabin in the correct structural order without rushing the joints. The workroom on the south half had good light through the new window, and a proper workt and shelf space for thread and fabric, and the growing collection of tools she had been buying with the sewing income, which had proven steadier than she had projected through the winter and into spring.