Rose had been young enough when Eleanor died that grief lived in her body more than in her mind. She was a child who needed to be near people who needed the specific reassurance of physical presence, who had learned very early that the people you counted on could disappear without warning, and so the ones who were here needed to be held close and accounted for. She had decided about Margaret with the speed and certainty that small children sometimes decided things, and she did not revisit the decision or hedge it or make it conditional. She had simply opened a door and walked through it and left it open behind her. Margaret loved them.
She understood this clearly by the third Friday, and she did not flinch from it or qualify it or remind herself that things could still go wrong. She loved them the way you loved things that were real with her eyes open, including the parts that were complicated. Nathan, she was still learning. He was slow to open, not from coldness, but from the specific caution of a man who understood the weight of what he was offering, and did not want to offer it carelessly. He showed her things instead of telling her things.
He showed her the north pasture where he was planning to extend the fence line in spring. He showed her Eleanor's garden, which he had kept going through some combination of stubbornness and love. The plants tended carefully through seasons she would never see. He showed her the farmhouse. That was in November, 6 weeks after the harvest festival on a Friday evening, when the girls were at their aunts, and the cold had come down hard and sudden the way Montana cold did.
Not a gradual suggestion, but a fact final and immediate. He drove her out to the edge of his land in the cart, and they walked the rest of the way to the farmhouse in the dark with a lantern, and she could see her breath, and his and the stars above them were the particular stars of a Montana winter that looked like someone had been excessive about it, too many, too bright. The farmhouse was small and solid, and had been empty for 3 years. He had replaced the roof in October. The floors were new wood, still smelling of pine.
The kitchen was larger than it looked from outside with a window over the worktop that faced east. And Margaret stood in front of that window in the lamplight and thought about mornings with light coming in while dough was rising. She said, "You did all this yourself." "Mostly," he said. Jim Hadley helped with the roof.
"I didn't tell him why." She turned to look at him. He was standing in the middle of the empty kitchen with the lantern and his coat and his careful eyes and he looked like a man who had put a great deal of himself into something and was now standing in front of it and waiting. She said, "Nathan, what are you saying to me?" He said, "I'm not saying it yet.
I'm showing you first a beat. I learned that from you actually. You showed up every Sunday for 4 months before you ever said a word about what it cost you." I figured. He looked at the floor.