Just enough. Sadi had turned back to the fire, was quiet for a while. Then, without particular ceremony, she was careful with things. You can see it in how she hung it. The knot faces the light on purpose.
He looked at the ribbon. He'd never noticed that. He didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything, and that was fine. Sadie listened without filling the pauses. One question only, what had Anna grown?
Herbs mostly, some for cooking, some medicinal. Epazote, yerba santa, a couple of others I didn't know the names of. Sadie turned to look at the dark rectangle of the kitchen window. They may still be there. Herbs come back from the root.
He hadn't thought of that. The next morning she went out to the kitchen garden before breakfast. He watched through the window as she crouched over the overgrown beds and began pulling away the dead matter carefully, sorting what she pulled. He brought her coffee and she pointed out three plants that had come back from the root, yarrow, something he didn't recognize, and the epazote, identifiable even in its weedy autumn state to someone who knew what she was looking for. He stood there looking at them for a moment and something moved in his chest that wasn't quite grief or wasn't only grief.
Something adjacent to it that was warmer. Sadie didn't look up from the bed. Your wife knew her plants. She did. Good soil here.
If you clear it properly and protect it through winter, it will come back strong in spring. He set down his coffee and started clearing the far corner of the bed while she worked the near one. They worked the garden in silence for an hour side by side and it was the most content he had felt in two years. A fact he registered with some surprise and did not examine too closely. On the evening of the seventh day, the Quillen gang arrived.
He'd come in from the last check on the horses and found Sadie standing absolutely still near the front window, looking through the gap in the shutters with a stillness that was different from her ordinary stillness. She held up one hand when he pushed through the door. He stopped and went quiet without thinking about it. He came to stand beside her and look where she was looking. The yard was dark.