She went upstairs to change. Marin did not come down. Odora waited. She set the table. She took the bread out of the oven.
She put coffee on. She waited. After 20 minutes, she went to the foot of the stairs and called up, "Marin, breakfast." "I'm coming," the girl said. Her voice was steady.
Another 5 minutes passed. Then Marin appeared at the top of the stairs wearing the burgundy dress. She stood at the top long enough for Odora to see it fit. The shoulders were right. The length was right.
She'd measured from memory and from the distance between the floor and where Marin's current skirt fell, and she had gotten it right within a finger's width. The collar sat flat. The sleeves were long enough to come just past the wristbone. Marin walked down the stairs, and she walked the way a 13-year-old girl walks when she hasn't been a girl in 3 years. And something has just reminded her.
She still is one carefully because she wasn't sure of her footing in this unfamiliar territory. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Garrick was in the kitchen doorway. He had come back from wherever he'd gone after their exchange, and he was standing there with his coffee in his hand, looking at his daughter in her new dress, and his expression had not settled into anything recognizable. It was somewhere between things, too many things happening in it at once.
Marin looked at her father, then at Odora, then at her father again, she said. She sewed until her fingers bled. Papa Garrick turned to look at Odora's hands. The cotton strips around three of her fingers were fresh, but the slight stiffness in the way she held them was visible if you knew what to look for. He set his coffee down.
He crossed the kitchen and opened the door to Odora's room. She didn't stop him. He stood in the doorway of her pantry room and looked at the cedar trunk. Its lid was raised. The bare boards showed plainly in the morning light.
Beside the trunk on the wash stand, the brass tacks were arranged in a careful line. All 127 of them, ordered by size, the way she'd removed them. Some were slightly bent from working them free. He stood looking at the trunk for a long time. Behind him, Marin said quietly, "She cut apart the last thing her aunt ever made for her papa."
The school Christmas program was on the 26th. Dileia Frost had organized it in the way that school teachers organized things in frontier towns with considerable hope and limited resources and a determination that the limited resources were simply a planning problem and not a referendum on the effort. There were paper chains along the window sills. There were 12 children of varying ages seated in a row at the front of the room and behind them another 20 seated in chairs brought from the church hall next door and behind those were the parents standing filling the space between the furniture and the walls. Garrick stood at the back left with Harland Mott beside him because Harland had come on the grounds that someone needed to drive the wagon and he'd stayed because Harland generally stayed for things he pretended were obligations of practicality.