Things she was doing after two decades of doing it. Mara wore a blue dress she'd had made in Milhaven. Not elaborate, just a color she'd chosen because it was the one she'd wanted, which seemed like a sufficient reason. Gideon wore the good coat that she'd noticed him take out of the chest in the far corner the week before, and brushed down and hang on the peg by the door where it could air out. He'd said nothing about it.
She'd said nothing about it. It was a brown wool coat with good lines, and she thought, looking at him in it, that Ruth had probably had a good eye. She thought about Ruth without the complication she might have expected to feel. She thought about her the way she thought about Thomas, as someone who was part of what made the people in this room who they were, as someone whose absence was woven into the fabric of the present moment without poisoning it. The dead were part of the living.
She had come to understand. Not as hauntings, not as wounds, but as the specific shape of who you became while carrying them. You didn't stop carrying them. You just learned to carry them while also moving forward. Toby, when Doris Hail pronounced them married, looked at Gideon with the evaluating expression he'd been applying to him since the first morning in the barn.
The expression that meant he was updating his assessment. Then he said with the directness of a child who doesn't the reason for indirection,"Does that mean you're my father now?"The room was very quiet. Gideon looked at him. He crouched down to eye level, which was something he did automatically and which Toby had never mentioned, but which Mara had noticed was the thing that had allowed the relationship between them to develop the way it had not talking down. Not talking over, just adjusting to be at the level of the conversation he was actually having.
That's up to you. He said it can mean whatever you need it to mean. Toby considered this with genuine seriousness. My papa died, he said. I know he was good.
I know that, too, Gideon said. Toby looked at him for a long moment. You're good also, he said finally with the tone of a child delivering a considered judgment rather than a compliment. Different, but good, Gideon held his gaze. I'll try to keep being, he said.
Toby seemed satisfied with this. He went to find Orson, who had produced from somewhere a piece of hard candy that he'd been holding in reserve, and the moment dissolved into the ordinary details of an afternoon. Mara stood near the window, watching. Gideon came to stand beside her the way he'd been standing beside her in one form or another for 5 months. She didn't turn toward him, and he didn't reach for her.
They just stood together in the comfortable way of two people who had learned each other's silences and didn't need to fill them. He's going to be all right, Gideon said. Not a prediction, not reassurance. Just a statement about what he saw. Yes, she said.