Breakfast, he said. I'll wait. Coffee's ready, she said. He sat down at the table and poured his own coffee and opened his ledger out of habit, then closed it. He set it on the bench beside him, where it was still reachable, but no longer between him and the rest of the room, and he waited.
Bess came down first as always. She stopped two steps into the kitchen at the sight of her father sitting at the table, still present, not yet gone to the barn, and gave him the precise look of a child who suspects something, but hasn't decided if it's good yet. "Papa," she said. "Morning, Bess." She climbed into her chair with the particular effort of a small person managing furniture sized for adults and she looked at him across the table.
Are you sick? No, you're usually in the barn. I'll go after. Bess received this information and appeared to file it without reaching a conclusion. She asked Odora whether there were going to be eggs because she'd heard the chickens this morning and Odora said there were going to be eggs and that was that.
But Odora noticed how Bess watched her father from under her lashes for the first few minutes, making sure he was still there, making sure the breakfast at the table arrangement was not going to be cancelled before it had fully arrived. Garrick noticed, too, because he didn't open his ledger again. By the end of the first week of January, he had taken breakfast with his daughters every morning. By the end of the second week, he had also learned that Bess would not go near the northwest corner of the barn, where a gap between the boards let in a sound on windy nights that she had described to Tilda as the sound a big animal makes when it's breathing through the wall. Garrick spent 40 minutes one Saturday morning filling that gap with packed rags and fresh cut board and sealing it over with pitch from the hardware supply.
And that evening at supper, Bess ate her food with the undistracted focus of a child who has had a problem removed from her world rather than simply not mentioned. He did not tell Odora he'd done it. She found out because Bess told her with considerable satisfaction. Papa fixed the noise and then went back to her bread and butter as if this were simply the natural order of things. It was, Odora thought.
It should have been. That wasn't a criticism. It was just a measurement. Tilda's arithmetic came to his attention on a Wednesday. Tilda had been doing figures at the kitchen table after supper.
She did this three or four evenings a week, setting out her school papers with a methodical efficiency that matched her general approach to most things. And Garrick had come in from a late check on the cattle and stood warming his hands at the stove. And instead of taking his coffee to the front room or back to his ledger, he had stood there watching Tilda work. After a few minutes, he said, "What are you doing?" "Long division," Tilda said.
"How many columns?" She showed him. He studied the paper and then looked at her. "How old are you?" "Nine."