Bess's expression was entirely serious. "I'm glad you didn't go to Fort Collins." She went back to the kitchen before Odora could respond, which was perhaps deliberate and perhaps not. Odora sat at the sewing machine in Elizabeth Voss's sewing room, with the needle still held between her fingers and looked at the empty doorway for a moment, and the thing that moved in her chest was the specific feeling of arriving somewhere you have been traveling toward without knowing it. Not surprise, but recognition.
She was glad, too. It was Marin who asked about the hems. Not Bess's question, a different one. On a different afternoon, two weeks into March, when the snow was beginning to think about becoming mud, and the quality of light through the south window had shifted by some small degree toward warmth, Marin had come to the sewing room deliberately. She came in without knocking, which was knew she'd knocked every other time, and she sat down at the work table, not across from Odora, but beside her, in the way of someone claiming a position rather than requesting one.
Odora was working on something she'd started for herself. A practical thing, a blouse from a length of cotton she'd traded her mending work for at the dry goods store in town. She was almost finished with it. But she had started something else that morning alongside it, something she hadn't announced. Pinned and waiting on the second half of the worktable.
White cotton lawn, good weight for a summer garment. She had been doing the preliminary pinning and hadn't gotten further. Marin looked at it. She was quiet for a moment, reading the layout the way a person reads a page taking in the shapes, understanding what they added up to. That's not a blouse, Marin said.
No, Odora said. Marin looked at the white cotton, at the panel sizes, the layout, the particular proportions. She was 13, and she had grown up in a house with a sewing room, and she understood enough to read what she was looking at. She looked at Odora. Her expression was very still.
You're making a dress, she said. Yes, a formal one. Eventually, yes. Marin was quiet for a moment. The machine ran steadily on the blouse seam.
Outside, the sound of Harland's voice reached them from somewhere near the barn. Something about the east pasture. Instructions for the weak and faded again. Are you Marin started? Is that She stopped.
She was not a girl who struggled for words, which meant the word she was looking for was one she wasn't sure she had the right to use yet. Odora finished the seam on the blouse and cut her thread and looked at Marin directly. In the spring, she said, "When the cattle have sold and the bank note is settled, your father asked if he could court me properly." I said, "Yes." She held the girl's gaze.