He pulled the wagon to a stop at the barn and set the break and sat for a moment in the specific cold silence of a winter night at the edge of December. Behind them in the wagon bed, one of the girls shifted in her sleep. The sound of it small, ordinary, belonging to him landed somewhere in his chest with more weight than he'd expected. "What does it require?" He said.
She turned to look at him. "This morning," he said. "I asked you what your gratitude required. You said not wasting what I'd finally noticed." He paused.
"What does that mean practically?" Odora held his gaze for a moment. He had a feeling she was deciding something. Not about him specifically, but about how much of her thinking she was going to give away. Take breakfast with your daughters, she said, not before them, with them.
Learn what Tilda is reading. Find out that Bess is afraid of the dark in the northwest corner of the barn for a reason she doesn't quite have words for yet. She paused. Give Marin her Saturdays back. Her Saturdays?
She's been doing laundry every Saturday since before I arrived. She's 13. She should have Saturdays. Garrick sat with that. All right, he said.
Odora nodded. She climbed down from the wagon seat before he could help her and went to the back to gather the sleeping Bess without disturbing Tilda's arrangement more than necessary. And she carried the girl toward the house with the competent ease of someone who had done this before a long time ago in a different life, or perhaps no life at all, perhaps only a life she'd been rehearsing for without knowing it. Garrick unhitched the horse and put her up for the night, and he stood for a while in the barn in the cold, and he thought about three pale hemlines, and he thought about 127 brass ts arranged by size on a wash stand. He had asked what gratitude required, she had told him, not wasting what he'd finally noticed.
He was beginning to understand what that would cost him. Not money, something harder than money to produce. He put out the barn lamp and walked back through the dark toward the house where the light was on in the kitchen window and he could see Odora's shape moving past it. He went inside. The change in Garrick Voss was not dramatic.
That was what made it real. Dramatic change in a man like Garrick. The kind of change that announces itself that arrives with declarations and visible effort would have been performance. It would have lasted 2 weeks and then dissolved back into habit the way snow dissolves into mud, leaving only the evidence that it had been there. Odora had seen that kind of change before.
She'd sewed dresses for women who wore them to church for one Sunday and then hung them in closets where they were never spoken of again. What happened with Garrick was quieter than that and therefore harder to dismiss. The first morning after Christmas, he came downstairs at his usual hour, just after 5, before full light, boots already on, and Odora was at the stove, and the girls were not yet down. And he stopped at the kitchen threshold with his coat half-buttoned and said, I'll wait for them. Odora turned to look at him.