The eighth, the thumb. She was losing the race against daylight. She had miscalculated. She had told herself 3 weeks was enough time, working in the evenings, but she had forgotten to account for interruptions. Garrick stayed up late by the stove with his ledger, filling the kitchen with lamplight and the sound of a man trying to solve a problem that didn't have a solution yet, and on those nights she could not move her supplies from her room without explanation.
And so she sat on her bed in the dark and held the half-finished work in her lap and thought about what she was doing and whether she was doing it for the right reasons. She was not entirely sure. She was not sure if she was honest with herself that this was wholly about the girls. Some part of it was about the fact that she had arrived in this house with a sewing crate and no place to put her skills and she had been cooking and cleaning and making ledger entries for 6 weeks and not sewing anything that required her full attention. Some part of it was that the wool existed and the need existed and the intersection of those two things felt like the clearest thing in her life at the moment and she needed something to be clear but mostly it was the hemlines.
It kept coming back to the hemlines. She had 5 days left when Marin found her. It was 11 on a Thursday. Odora had the lamp turned low and the dress for Tilda spread across her knees. It was the most complicated piece because she'd had to piece the skirt from three separate panels and the seams needed pressing, and she'd been using a smooth rock from the yard, heated briefly on the kitchen stove during the day and kept wrapped in cloth to simulate an iron.
It wasn't working as well as she'd hoped. The seam still held a slight rise where she couldn't get enough pressure through the wool. She heard the floorboard, not from upstairs, from the kitchen. One floorboard between the kitchen threshold and the pantry door that moved slightly underweight, and she had been there 6 weeks, long enough to know each member of this household's nighttime habits. And this was not Garrick's gate or Bess's, and it was not the particular careful tread of Tilda sneaking to the kitchen for water.
Marin's footstep was deliberate. The door opened without a knock. Odora looked up. The girl stood in the doorway in her nightgown with her hair loose and her arms crossed in front of her chest, not against the cold, but in the posture of someone who has caught someone doing something and is still deciding how to respond to it. Her eyes went from Odora's face to the fabric spread across her knees to the pile of cut pieces on the bed behind her to the cedar trunk standing open and bare at the foot of the bed.
She looked at the trunk for a long time. Odora did not explain. She waited. That's your lining? Marin said.
Yes. From your aunt. Yes. Marin's eyes came back to the dress pieces on the bed. She was silent for a while, doing the same kind of rapid arithmetic that Odora recognized because she had seen it in her own face in mirrors for 32 years, checking the dimensions, calculating the sizes, arriving at a conclusion.
Those are for us, Marin said. It wasn't a question. Yes, Papa said after calving. He did. You said you understood.
I did understand, Odora said. I understood the ledger perfectly well. Marin looked at her without expression for several seconds. Her jaw worked once, the way it did when she was deciding something, and Odora had seen that expression often enough in the past 6 weeks to know the girl was somewhere between what she felt and what she was going to allow herself to say about it. Most of the time, she came down on the side of not saying.