He looked at her. None yet tonight. We got them undercover in time. Good. Ask me again in the morning.
She handed him the coffee. He took it with hands that were still slightly clumsy from the cold and drank it standing there. And she thought not for the first time that she had never known a man who occupied a difficult situation with less drama than Garrick Voss. He did not complain. He did not perform his suffering for an audience.
He simply absorbed it and kept moving the way the ranch itself absorbed winter and kept standing. She found this quality both admirable and at moments maddening. You should sleep, she said. In a while. The cattle will be where you left them in the morning.
He gave her a look that was almost dry. Almost. I'm not checking on the cattle. I'm making sure the north bedroom stove pipe hasn't gotten ice in it again. He finished the coffee and set the cup down.
Bess's room. Odora said nothing. He put his coat back on and went upstairs with his lamp. She cleaned the kitchen and put the remaining food away and sat down at the kitchen table for a while because she was not tired enough to sleep, and the cold outside made the warm kitchen feel like something worth sitting in rather than leaving. She had her mending, but she didn't pick it up.
She sat with her hands on the table and listened to the house, the north wall, the stove pipe, Garrick's footstep on the upstairs floor, the particular voice of the wind against the window glass. She was thinking about the Fort Collins letter. She had been thinking about it in some layer of her mind for 3 weeks. March 1st was 2 weeks away. She thought about what Garrick had said in the front room.
If it's the life you want, you should go. She thought about the quality of sincerity in his voice when he said it, and she thought about the fact that she had still not been able to determine even after 3 weeks of examination what that sincerity was made of. Was it respect? Was it restraint? Was it?
And here was the thought she kept arriving at and setting back down like a pan too hot to hold. Was it the restraint of a man who felt more than he was saying and was choosing not to leverage that, feeling to keep her somewhere she hadn't chosen freely? Or had he simply told her the straightforward truth, which was that she should go and that they would be fine because they would be, she did not know how to ask. She had spent 32 years being useful to people, and useful people did not ask. She heard Marin's door at 11:00.