Then, were we the reason? Us girls? Odora thought about this carefully because Marin deserved a careful answer. You were always the reason, she said. He never stopped loving you.
He just lost the road to you for a while. She looked at the white cotton laid out on the table waiting. I think he found it again. Marin looked at the needle in her hand. Then at the worktable, then at the south window where the march light was doing its tentative spring work on the bare boards of the cedar trunk, she said quietly and entirely without drama, "I'm glad she sent you here."
Odora knew she meant Winifred Pomeroy's advertisement. She knew she meant the circumstance, the aunt's death, the ad in the paper, the stage to Wyoming, the interview in the yard where Garrick had barely looked at her. The long chain of ordinary accidents that had put her in this room. "So am I," Odora said. Marin held the threaded needle out to her.
"Show me the collar stitch," she said. Odora took the needle. She set it to the white cotton and began. Two years later, the spring branding ran three days longer than planned, and Garrick came home on a Thursday afternoon with his shoulders aching and his boots needing attention and the specific tiredness of a man who has been outside since before light. The sewing room door was open.
He stood in the hallway for a moment and listened. The treadle ran steadily Odora's rhythm, which he knew by now, the way he knew the sounds of the cattle and the particular voice of the north wind. Underneath it. Marin's voice, 15 now, asking something about seam allowance. Tilda answering before Odora could, which made Odora say with the dry patience he had come to understand was her version of affection.
Let me answer my own questions, Tilda. Bess was humming something formless and off-key. The cradle made its small rhythmic sound against the floorboard. Garrick walked to the doorway and looked in. His daughters were arranged around the worktable the way they always were, now Marin with fabric.
Tilda with her geometry translated into pattern work. Bess keeping one foot on the cradle without looking at it, her reading book open in her lap. Odora sat at the machine with Elizabeth's thimble on her right hand and his son asleep in the cradle beside the south window. The cedar trunk sat beneath the window relined in patchwork, pieces of old dresses, a scrap of white lawn from the wedding, one small rectangle of burgundy. Bess looked up first.
Papa, you're late. He hung his hat on the peg by the door. Nobody stopped what they were doing. Nobody needed to. He was expected home.