He looked at the dresses again at the matching color. He was not a slow man when he chose to pay attention. That's your trunk lining. Was Odora said. She could feel him standing in the doorway working through what that meant.
She kept her back to him. After a moment, she heard him cross the kitchen to the pegs and stand looking at the dresses more closely. The collars, the seams, the careful stitching of the sleeve attachments. You sewed these? He said, "Yes, by hand.
The sewing machine wasn't available." A pause. "Miss, the girls will be up soon," she said. "I'd prefer they see them first thing." He went quiet.
Odora turned to check the bread and caught a glimpse of his face. It had an expression she hadn't seen on it before. Not moved. Exactly. More like a man who has reached into his pocket for something he expected to find and discovered something else entirely.
He left the kitchen without another word. Bess cames downstairs first, as she always did, and stood at the kitchen threshold, still half asleep, and then went entirely awake all at once when she saw the burgundy dress hanging from the peg beside her coat. She walked toward it slowly. The way she'd approached Odora's curved scissors on that first morning with her hands out and her head slightly forward, making sure it was real before she touched it. "Is that for me?"
She said. "It's yours," Odora said. Bess reached out and touched the collar, then the sleeve. Then she turned and wrapped both arms around Odora's waist without saying anything else, which was the most communication Odora had received from anyone in this house that wasn't task related since she arrived. And she stood with her hand on the back of the girl's head for a moment and let herself feel it.
Tilda appeared 3 minutes later and stopped dead in the doorway at the sight of Bess wearing a new dress already wearing it over her nightgown and turned a precise rapid look at the two remaining dresses on the pegs. She looked at Odora. Odora nodded. Tilda walked to the pegs with considerably more self-possession than her sister, but somewhat less than she was trying to project, and took her dress down and held it up and turned it over to examine the seams. "You pieced the skirt," she said.
"I did." Tilda felt along the seam with one finger. "You can't see it. That's the idea." Tilda considered this with a slightly narrowed look, the way she considered arithmetic, making sure the logic held.
Then she said, "It fits." Try it on and tell me for certain," Odora said. Tilda looked at her for one more moment. Then she said in a voice that was trying to be ordinary and was not quite managing it. "Thank you."