Not unkind, just efficient. You have experience with children. I've had experience being one, Odora said. And I've spent the better part of my life managing a household for someone else. Children generally handle themselves fine if adults give them enough dignity.
Garrick Voss looked at her for a moment without expression. Then he said, "Rooms off the kitchen. Used to be a pantry. $12 a month, board included. Harland will bring your trunk in." He turned and walked back to the barn.
That was the interview. Odora stood in the yard for a moment, letting the wind find the gap between her collar and her hat, and thought, "All right, then." The room had been a pantry. The shelves were still there, emptied and wiped down, and someone had moved a narrow iron bed in and covered it with a quilt that had seen better decades. There was a hook on the back of the door and a small window that looked out at the side of the barn.
The window let in enough light to sew by in the morning, which was the first thing Odora checked. She set her cedar trunk at the foot of the bed and her sewing crate on the highest shelf within reach. Then she went to find the kitchen because whoever had been cooking hadn't cleaned the grease trap in some time and she wanted to understand what she was working with before she started anything. The kitchen was large. The stove was adequate.
The larder was organized in the way a child organizes things grouping by size and color rather than by function. The flour was beside the axle grease because both were in large containers. The dried beans were next to a box of nails. Odora was standing at the larger door, taking mental inventory when she heard someone behind her. She turned.
A girl stood at the kitchen entrance for her age, dark-haired like her father, watching Odora with an expression that was not quite hostile, but had the exact structure of hostility if you looked close enough. She had an apron tied around her waist and flour on her left sleeve. "I already started supper," the girl said. "All right," Odora said. "What are you making?"
A pause. The girl hadn't expected that question. Bean soup and cornbread. That'll do well tonight. Do you want help, or would you rather I stay out of your way?
The girl's eyes narrowed slightly. She had been preparing for an argument, and Odora had declined to provide one. Stay out of my way, she said. Done, Odora said, and went back to examining the larder. Later, she learned the girl's name was Marin.
The two younger girls were easier, the way younger children almost always are. They haven't yet learned to protect themselves against the people who might leave. Bess, who was six, found Odora the following morning sitting at the kitchen table before sunrise, testing the edge of her sewing scissors on a scrap of cotton. Bess stood in the doorway in her nightgown with her hair loose and her feet bare on the cold floorboards and stared at the scissors like they were something she'd been looking for. "What are those?"