"That's fifth-year work." Tilda looked at him with the slight impatience of a child explaining something obvious to an adult she has otherwise decided is competent. "I know," Miss Frost said, "I can sit with the fifth years for arithmetic." Since when? Since October.
Garrick stood with his coffee. He looked at his daughter with an expression. And Odora could not quite categorize because it was not one simple thing. It was the face of a man recalculating, updating a figure he'd been carrying too long without checking it against new information. "Show me how you do it," he said.
He pulled out the chair across from Tilda and sat down. Tilda blinked once rapidly, a tell Odora had come to recognize as the girl's version of surprise, and then she straightened her paper and began to explain. She was good at explaining. She had the teacher's instinct of knowing where the logic would be lost if you skipped a step. And she didn't skip any steps with her father.
She was careful with him. Careful in the way you are with someone whose opinion you want to deserve. Garrick listened. He asked one question, a real one, about how to handle the remainder when it wasn't clean. Tilda explained it twice, trying different words, and when he nodded, she looked pleased with a degree of restraint that suggested she was trying not to look too pleased.
They sat at the table for 45 minutes. When Odora put the lamps out in the kitchen, they moved to the front room and continued by the fire, and she could hear Tilda's voice through the doorway precise. Slightly impatient when he got something wrong, enormously patient when he tried again. She finished washing the dishes and went to her room and lay on her bed in the dark with her hands folded on her chest. And she thought, "All right, he's doing it.
He is actually doing it." Marin was the last and the most complicated, which was consistent with every other aspect of Marin Voss. Garrick came to understand the full scope of his eldest daughter's situation, not through one confrontation, but through accumulation, a series of small realizations that landed on him over the course of two weeks. Like stones dropped one at a time into still water. The first was the Saturday laundry.
He had told Odora he would give Marin her Saturday's back, and then on the first Saturday of January, he had gone to the barn at first light, and come back midmorning to find Marin already at the washboard, up to her elbows in steaming water, her sleeves pushed up, and her jaw set in the specific expression of someone doing a task they've accepted as non-negotiable. He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. I thought I asked Miss Finch to handle this, he said. She was going to, but I Marin stopped. She didn't have a good reason, and she knew it.
It goes faster if I help. Does it need to go faster? She looked at him. It's Saturday, he said. Papa, I don't mind.