Odora heard that. She heard all of it. She looked at this man across the kitchen table in the low lamp light. This rancher with his scarred hands and his locked rooms and his three daughters and his ledger full of obligations, and she thought about the various ways a person's love for. Another person could look from the outside, and how completely different they could appear from what they actually were.
He had told her to go, not because she didn't matter, because she mattered enough that he wouldn't use it. She had spent 3 weeks thinking he was indifferent. "Garrick," she said. She had not called him by his name before. Not once in 8 weeks of shared meals and shared mornings and a fire in the front room and a kitchen in the deep of winter.
He looked at her with the directness that cost him something. "I'm not going to Fort Collins," she said. He didn't respond immediately. He just looked at her and the set of his face did something she had not seen it do before. Something that was not quite relief, because relief implies surprise, and he was not surprised, not exactly.
He looked like a man who had been holding something very carefully for a long time and had just been given permission to set it down. You don't have to, he started. I know I don't have to, she said. That's rather the point. She picked up the thimble and turned it in her fingers the way he had.
I'm not going because I'm choosing not to. Not because the ranch needs a housekeeper, and not because your daughters need me, though both of those things may also be true. She set the thimble back on the table between them. I'm staying because when I imagine leaving here, I feel the specific way you feel when you're about to make a mistake, and you know it." Garrick looked at her for a long moment.
The lamp was burning low. It would need oil before morning. The kitchen had that particular depth of quiet that only comes in the middle of the night when the cold has settled and everyone is still. "I need to tell you something," he said. She waited.
"I can't match Fort Collins's wages. I can't offer you a partnership in a going business. What I can offer you, he stopped. He looked at the thimble. What I can offer you at the moment is one bank note coming due in April, 15 head of cattle, fewer than I started winter with, a barn with a patched roof, and three daughters who need a mother in various ways that they would all phrase differently, but that amount to the same thing.
He paused. And I'm aware that's an extremely poor offer. It is, Odora said. I'm aware, however, she looked at him. However, the bank note is a problem with a structural solution.