I can maybe swing more hands for 2 weeks if I hire against the spring sale income, which is money I don't technically have. Then do that, she said, and went back to the larder. He hired two additional men for 2 weeks. Three more cattle died in January. After that, the worst of the cold eased by a degree or two, just enough, and the losses stopped.
He never forgot that she'd told him to hire against income he didn't have yet. She'd said it with the tone of someone who had already done the calculus and decided the risk was reasonable, and he had trust her calculus, and she'd been right. He filed that away in a place he didn't examine too closely. The letter from Fort Collins arrived on a Tuesday in the third week of January. Odora saw it in the post first because Odora had taken over the trip to the post box as part of her household management and she recognized the Fort Collins postmark and the handwriting Winifred Pomeroy which she had seen once before on a note that came the previous spring when they were still in the tentative stage of what had been a professional acquaintance and might have become more.
Mrs. Pomeroy ran a dress establishment on the main street of Fort Collins that served the better families of Lamur County. And she had a reputation that had reached Odora through four different sources, which generally meant the reputation was accurate. She carried the letter to her room and opened it at her small table. It was direct in the way of a businesswoman writing to another businesswoman without ceremony.
Mrs. Pomeroy's current seamstress had married and moved to Colorado Springs, leaving her without qualified help heading into spring, which was her busiest season. She was offering Odora $24 monthly to begin with, private lodging above the shop included, and a conversation about eventual partnership if the arrangement suited them both. She required an answer by the 1st of March. Odora read the letter twice.
Then she folded it and put it on the table and sat with her hands in her lap and thought, " $24 a month, $2 more than twice what Garrick was paying her." Private lodging, which meant a room with a real stove and a window she could open without looking at the side of a barn. Work that was entirely her trade. Not cooking and accounting and braiding small girls hair, but the actual work of her hands. The work she was good at in the specific way that uses the part of you that doesn't switch off.
Partnership, eventually her name on something. She thought about the ranch ledger with its columns of obligation piled on one side. She thought about the bank note coming due in April. She thought about Garrick's face in January mornings when he came in from the cattle and didn't tell anyone what the count was. She thought about Bess falling asleep against her side on the wagon seat coming home from the Christmas program.
She put the letter in the bottom of her cedar trunk beneath her spare garments and said nothing about it. She said nothing for 4 days. On the fifth day, Marin found it. It was not deliberate. Odora had asked Marin to fetch her spare thread spool from the trunk, a minor errand, the kind she gave each of the girls interchangeably, because Marin did not trust gestures of particular trust, and Odora had learned that the way to reach her was through the ordinary rather than the significant.
Marin went to the trunk and lifted the garments, and the letter was there, face up, the Fort Collins postmark visible. Odora was in the kitchen when Marin came back. She knew from the quality of the footstep on the threshold Marin's deliberate tread arrived slightly too quickly before she turned around. Marin held the thread spool, and she held the letter both. She didn't try to explain why she'd read it.