Bess was in the second row of children, small enough that Garrick had to look for her before he found the flash of burgundy. She had her hands in her lap and her back straight, and she was watching Dileia Frost with the concentrated attention of someone who was not going to miss their cue. When her turn came a four-line rhyme about winter that she had practiced so many times, Garrick had heard it in his sleep. She stood up and looked out at the room without flinching and said her four lines clearly and sat back down and then turned to find her father's face in the crowd. And when she found it, she smiled with her whole face.
The kind of smile a six-year-old produces when they have done something they knew how to do. And someone they love was there to see it. Garrick had not seen Bess smile like that in a while. He was not sure how long. Long enough that it landed somewhere unexpectedly.
Tilda was in the fourth row sitting next to a girl with red braids. She didn't look for her father when she sat down. She was talking to the red-braided girl with the ease of someone who felt entitled to be there, which was not something Garrick had been aware. She felt uncertain about until he saw what it looked like now that she wasn't uncertain anymore. Marin was with the older children.
When the program moved to the upper grades and the older students stood in a loose arrangement near the window, Garrick found his eldest daughter and then did something he had not done in a while, which was look at her without simultaneously thinking about what needed doing next. He simply looked at her. She was standing straight. Her chin was up. She had her hands clasped in front of her, and her dark hair was braided back neatly the way Odora did it.
And she was wearing the burgundy dress with its collar and its proper length, and she looked like a girl, not like the girl who had been managing his household and hiding Christmas notices between the flower tin and the wall. A girl, his daughter, 13 years old. His throat did a thing he was not prepared for. He thought about the hemlines, Marin's three pale hemlines, and the fact that there was no room for a fourth. He thought about how many mornings he had come downstairs and eaten the breakfast she had already started and taken the day's worries out to the barn with him and not once looked back at the kitchen where a 13-year-old girl was combing her sister's hair.
He thought about the Christmas notice folded between the flower tin and the wall and what calculation had led Marin to put it there. He had told himself for 3 years that keeping the ranch alive was keeping his family alive. Looking at his daughter in her burgundy dress in Delia Frost's school room, he understood for the first time that he had gotten the math wrong. The ranch was land and cattle and banknotes. His daughters were growing in the dark, and he had not noticed until a woman he barely interviewed had taken the lining out of her dead aunt cedar trunk and sewed through the night until her fingers split.
Harland said something beside him. Garrick didn't register it. He was watching Marin straighten her collar with two quick fingers and then let her hands fall and stand easy in her own body. And he was thinking that this was what he had failed to notice was disappearing, not the clothing, the girl inside it. On the drive home, Bess fell asleep against Tilda's shoulder in the wagon bed, both of them bundled in their coats, the burgundy wool just visible at the cuffs.
The night was clear and very cold. Garrick drove and Odora sat beside him on the wagon seat and they did not speak for the first mile. Then Odora said, not particularly directed at him. Bess didn't hide once. "No," Garrick said.
"Tilda sat next to a girl I haven't seen her speak to before." Redheaded. "That's the Callaway girl." Tilda used to be friends with her, I think, before. Odora was quiet.