It was ordinary. In other words, imperfectly humanly ordinary. And ordinary Tessa had learned was not a small thing. Ordinary was what you built toward. Ordinary was what the held breath house had not been for 4 years and what it was becoming.
And the becoming was not a moment, but a slow accumulation of moments exactly like this one. December arrived and the ranch settled into winter operation with the focused efficiency of a household that has done this before and knows what it requires. The debt pressure was gone, which changed the texture of every decision. Not dramatically, not like a different life, but the way a room changes when you remove something that had been taking up space so long you'd stopped seeing it and only noticed its absence when the space opened up. Tessa and Hollis worked on the accounts together, three evenings a week.
He was exactly as good at it as she'd suspected, and he was also exactly as difficult as she'd anticipated. Not difficult, like Calder's early resistance, which had been about territory, but difficult in the way that genuinely precise people are difficult to work with, because they catch your errors before you catch your errors before you do, and they're not always diplomatic about it. The third time he corrected her midcalation, she put her pen down and said, "Hollis, you're right. I made an error, but you can tell me that without the face. " He looked at her. What face?
The face you make that says the error is evidence of a larger pattern of inadequacy. He was quiet for a moment. I don't mean to make that face. I know you don't. Work on it anyway.
You're going to be working with people who make errors all your life. And if you can't find a way to correct them without making them feel like idiots, the half of them will stop telling you when something's wrong. And that's worse than the original error. He absorbed this with the focused attention he gave to everything useful. That's true, he said.
It's very true. Write it down somewhere. He did not write it down. But 3 days later, she saw him correct Tobin's arithmetic on a fence measurement in a way that was noticeably less annihilating than his usual approach. And Tobin received the correction and adjusted without the defensive flare up that usually accompanied Hollis, finding him wrong about something.
Small things, small degrees. EMTT came to her in January with something she hadn't expected. He sat down across from her in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon when the others were variously occupied and he put his hand flat on the table in front of him in the deliberate way he had when he was going to say something that had required preparation. I want to tell you something. He said, "All right," she said.