Then I'll have it with you in the spring. All right, she said. In the meantime, he picked up his coffee. You're not the housekeeper. She raised an eyebrow slightly.
I mean, you'll still cook and keep accounts. I'm not pretending the practical situation has changed overnight. He had the slight discomfort of a man who has started a sentence that is more complicated than he anticipated. What I mean is in terms of how I think of you in this house, how I speak to you. You're not, he stopped.
You should be Odora, he said. If that's all right. She looked at him. Garrick, she said simply. The corner of his mouth did something.
Not a smile close to one. It counted. March came in warmer than February had left, which was not a high bar, but was appreciated by everyone on the ranch, including the cattle, who emerged from the worst of the winter, looking thin and relieved in the way that living creatures look when a sustained difficulty has finally relented. Garrick walked the pastures with Harland every morning for the first two weeks, counting and assessing, and the numbers were not comfortable, but they were workable, which was the most honest thing you could say about the ranch's condition. The letter to Fort Collins went out on the 3rd of March.
Odora wrote it at the kitchen table on a Tuesday evening after supper when the girls were doing their schoolwork and Garrick was at his ledger. She wrote it in the direct business-like way that matched Mrs. Pomemeroyy's own correspondence and said that she was grateful for the offer and had decided to remain in her current situation. She did not elaborate. Mrs.
Pomeroy was a practical woman and would understand that the decision had been made and would not require excavation. She folded it and sealed it and set it on the stack of outgoing mail beside the kitchen door. When she came back to the table, Garrick was looking at it, not reading it, it was sealed, just looking at where it was. Fort Collins, she said. He looked at her.
Yes, it's done, she said. He nodded once. He looked back at his ledger, but she noticed that the quality of his attention to the ledger for the rest of that evening was somewhat differentless, burdened somehow, less like a man trying to calculate his way out of a situation, and more like a man doing arithmetic, because arithmetic needed doing, and that was all. The sewing room was cold for the first week. The stove took several days of consistent burning before the room stopped holding winter the way an unattended room holds it in the walls, in the corners, in the particular chill that lives in places where the air has been still too long.
Odora built the fire each morning after breakfast and let it do its work. She moved her sewing crate from the pantry shelf to the wide worktable under the south window, where the light was genuinely good, better than anywhere else in the house, and she moved her smaller personal items to the single bureau drawer that wasn't occupied by Elizabeth's folded fabric lengths. She left the fabric lengths. She did not touch them. They were not hers to decide about yet.