She put the cloth in the kit away. I'm more interested in the spring than in relitigating the winter. He looked at her for a moment. You know what I like about you?
My accounts. Presumably. Your accounts are excellent. He said it straight.
But what I mean is you don't hold on to the wrong things. You hold on to the things worth holding and you let the rest go when you're done with it. She thought about that about the Columbus lawyer and what he'd said and how long she'd held it. About every room she'd been asked to leave and every door closed against her that she'd carried around for years as evidence of her own inadequacy.
"I'm working on it," she said. "I'm better at it than I used to be." "That's all any of it is," he said. Working on it.
Caleb chose that moment to arrive at their feet at speed, having perfected in the last two weeks a walking style that could only be described as a controlled fall at increasing velocity. And he grabbed his father's knee and looked up at Nathan with an expression of total urgency that meant one of about four things, none of which he could specify yet beyond the urgency itself. Nathan reached down and picked him up, bad arm and all, and Caleb grabbed his collar and looked around the kitchen from his new elevation with the satisfaction of someone who has achieved a superior position. She watched them.
She thought, "This is it. This is the thing right here. This specific moment. This man with his bound up arm and his son on his hip and this kitchen that she had built from nothing into something.
This house that had been empty and was now full." She thought, "I came here looking for work and I found a life which are not the same thing and which I could not have planned for. Not really. Not even if I tried.
The life found me the same way most important things find you. Not because you aimed for them precisely, but because you kept moving in an honest direction and stayed when staying was the harder choice. May arrived and with it the first real warmth, the kind that stayed through midday and left something behind even after it was gone. The kitchen garden came up not perfectly.
It was never perfectly. Some of the early planting had been too early, and some of the seeds had not taken, and there was a persistent problem with something eating the lettuce that she had not yet identified. But it came up green and real. And there, Burch turned out to have an unexpected aptitude for quiet, which she valued in ranch hands.
He did his work without requiring more management than the work itself required. He spoke to her with the same directness he used with Nathan, and he had a way with Caleb that was gruff and completely sincere, which Caleb responded to with instant and permanent devotion. Dolan stayed. She'd wondered in November if he would.