Yes, ma'am. Amelia said you'll carry refreshments. Stay along the walls. Don't speak unless spoken to. And when spoken to, keep it brief.
Yes, ma'am. And for heaven's sake, press your uniform properly this time. Last month at the Morrison dinner, you had a crease running sideways across the front. Yes, ma'am. Margaret looked at her for a moment with an expression Amelia had long since stopped trying to interpret.
It was somewhere between pity and efficiency, which was the closest Margaret ever came to warmth. "You're a good worker, Amelia," she said finally. "Just remember where you are." Amelia had nodded and gone to press her uniform. She remembered where she was. "She always did." The Harrington Gathering was the social event of the summer, the kind of thing people in Red Willow Creek spent weeks preparing for and months talking about afterward.
Franklin Harrington ran the second largest cattle operation in the county, and his wife Victoria ran everything else. She was a tall woman with sharp cheekbones and sharper opinions, and she had the particular talent of making every social occasion feel like an examination that most people were failing. The fairgrounds had been transformed for the evening. Long tables draped in white cloth, lanterns strung between posts, a hired quartet playing in the corner, women in silk and taffetta, and men in their Sunday suits, all arranged in careful clusters according to an invisible hierarchy that everyone understood and no one acknowledged. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Nathaniel Carter.
Amelia had seen Nathaniel Carter before. The way you see a landmark noted cataloged largely irrelevant to your daily concerns. He was 35 years old and he owned the Carter ranch which spread across more acres than Amelia could reasonably picture. He was not the kind of man who needed to announce himself. He was simply there and the room arranged itself around him the way water arranges itself around a stone.
He was tall, broad across the shoulders, with dark hair that needed cutting, and the kind of tan that came from years of actual outdoor work rather than afternoon strolls. He dressed well when occasion demanded it. But there was always something about the way he wore his good clothes that suggested mild impatience, as if the suit was a concession he was making, and he hadn't fully agreed to all the terms. Amelia noticed all of this the way she noticed most things, carefully, briefly, and from a safe distance. She had a job to do.
For the first hour, she moved through the gathering the way she always did. Quietly, efficiently, a coffee pot in one hand, a tray in the other, appearing at elbows, and disappearing again before anyone quite registered she'd been there. She refilled cups and cleared glasses and stepped around dancing couples without breaking stride. And not a single person in that room gave her a second glance. That was exactly how she preferred it.
The trouble started the way trouble usually did without warning and through no fault of her own. She was crossing from the refreshment tables toward the far end of the gathering, her coffee pot full, her eyes on the path between the clusters of guests when a man stepped backward without looking. He caught her elbow. The coffee pot lurched. She twisted sharply to keep it from spilling, which put her directly in the path of Victoria Harrington, who had been approaching from the opposite direction with a glass of lemonade and an expression that said she had been looking for something to be displeased about.
The collision was minor, a small jostle, Victoria's lemonade sloshed, but didn't spill. Amelia caught herself immediately and stepped back. I beg your pardon, ma'am, she said. I'm sorry. That was my fault.