And she thought that $4 a week was enough to begin with and that the step on the porch needed a nail and that Bess would come around or she wouldn't and that either way there was work to do in the morning. She was not hopeful, exactly. She had learned to be careful with that. But she was not afraid and that was its own kind of solid ground.
The first week passed the way first weeks do with the establishing of rhythms and the careful learning of what a household requires. Vera learned that the pump needed not just a firm hand but a particular angle, slightly to the left of what seemed right. And that the oven ran hot on the right side and needed watching. And that Martin would eat almost anything put in front of him but that Bess had a complicated relationship with beans that had something to do with a previous housekeeper and was not Vera's fault.
She did not ask about the previous housekeeper. She did not ask about the wife whose name she did not yet know and whose absence was present in the house the way a missing window is present. Not as a thing you see but as a change in the light and the temperature. She cooked and cleaned and kept the kitchen garden from getting worse, and she mended what could be mended, and she did not speak unless spoken to in the first few days, which was not timidity, but strategy, and it was the right one.
By the end of the first week, Bess had begun to linger in the kitchen in the mornings. She did not help. She sat on the stool near the window and watched, but she was there, which was something.
It was on a Thursday morning of the second week that Martin came in from outside with a piece of paper in his hand, a notice of some kind that had blown off the wagon, and he held it up to Vera and said, "What does it say?" She read it to him. It was a notice about the price of timber at the mill in Grantville, which was not interesting to Martin, but the reading of it was, and he watched her mouth while she read as if he were learning the shape of the words. Then he said, "Can you read anything?" She said, "Most things."
He said, "Everything." She said, "Nearly." He thought about this. Then he went back outside, but after supper that evening, he came and found her in the kitchen, and he had a book in his hands, a small battered thing with a broken spine, and he held it out to her and said, "Can you read this to me?" It was a book of fables, old ones with woodcut illustrations.
She didn't know where it had come from. She sat down at the kitchen table, and Martin climbed up beside her, and she read him three fables before he fell asleep against her arm. And she sat there a moment in the lamplight with the sleeping child heavy against her side and the book open on the table and the fire low in the stove, and something moved through her that she did not examine too closely because it was too new, and the house was too quiet, and she was not ready for it yet. She heard a sound and looked up.
Caleb was in the doorway. He had come in from the mill without her hearing him. He was looking at the table, at Martin asleep and the open book and the lamp, and his face was doing something that he set aside before she could read it clearly. He crossed the room and picked up Martin without waking him and carried him to bed.
When he came back through the kitchen, he did not say anything about what he had seen. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot she kept warm for him and stood at the window and drank it. She closed the book. He said, "Where did you learn to read like that?" She said, "A woman named Sister Agatha taught me at the Caldwell County Home."
He said, "County home?" She said, "Orphanage. I was there from 7 to 16." He didn't say he was sorry, which she appreciated. He just nodded once, the way a man nods when he has filed something away.
He set the cup down, said, "Good night," and went to his room. She sat at the table a little longer in the quiet, and then she banked the fire and went to bed, and the wind came down off the ridge and the mill was still, and the house held the dark around it the way houses do when they are used to being held in it.
Bess thawed on a Tuesday, 3 weeks in, and it happened the way these things happen, without announcement. Vera had been working in the kitchen garden, pulling the worst of the weeds and turning the soil along the south edge where something might still be planted before the season turned entirely, and Bess came out and stood at the garden's edge and watched for a while, and then she said, "My mother had sweet peas along that fence." Vera sat back on her heels and looked at the fence. You could see where something had grown there, the old stems still wound in the wire.
She said, "They'd likely come back if the ground was cleared." Bess said, "She used to cut them and put them in a jar on the table." Vera said, "That's a good thing to do with sweet peas." Bess said nothing for a moment.
Then she said, "I know where the seeds are from last year. She saved them." Vera said, "It might be late in the season, but we could try." Bess went and got the seeds.
They planted them together along the south fence, and Bess knew exactly how deep and how far apart because her mother had shown her, and Vera followed her lead without making a point of it. And when they were done, they stood back and looked at the bare fence and the turned earth, and Bess said, "They probably won't come up." Vera said, "Probably not this year, but the ground will be ready for spring." Bess looked at her.
It was the first time she had looked directly at her without the measuring quality, without the careful distance. Then she went inside, but at supper she passed Vera the bread without being asked, which in the economy of a 9-year-old's regard was considerable.
The mill hands had opinions. There were three of them, and they came and went, and they ate the noon meal at the long table in the yard when the weather allowed, and they watched Vera the way men watch a new thing in a known place, with a mixture of curiosity and the particular skepticism reserved for things that might change the established order. The oldest one, a man named Pruitt with a gray beard and a habit of speaking in questions, asked her once where she'd come from, and she told him plainly, and he said, "Caldwell County. That's a long way."
And she said, "It is." And he said, "What brings a woman all the way out here?" And she said, "Work." He looked at her for a moment and then said, "Fair enough," and went back to his food.
The other two were younger. One of them, Doyle, had been in Haller's Creek long enough to have heard about the post office, and he was careful not to show it, which told her that he had heard. She fed them well. She kept the noon meal hot and the coffee strong, and she did not hover.