And she didn't complain about things that were simply the physical reality of being the size she was. You adapted. You managed. You did the work. 3 days later, she came out to the barn and found a new board beside the sled.
Wider than the one she'd been using, reinforced at the edges with a strip of hardwood, sanded smooth. She stood looking at it for a long moment. Silas was at the other end of the barn checking a harness. She didn't say anything immediately. She got herself down onto the board and rolled under the sled and felt the difference immediately.
The stability of it, the way it distributed her weight properly, the way she could shift without the whole thing threatening to tilt. And she worked for a while with that fact sitting quietly in her chest. When she came out, she looked at him. "You made this," she said. He didn't look up from the harness.
Needed doing Silas. He looked at her. Then she held his gaze. "Thank you," she said. He held her gaze for a moment.
Then he looked back at the harness. "Stop thanking me for things that needed doing," he said. "But his voice was different when he said it than when he'd said it before, and she noticed that, too." She rolled the board carefully against the wall and went back inside to start dinner. She did not let herself examine what she was feeling about the board too closely because the feelings it was producing were of the inconvenient kind. The kind that reminded her of small things Henry had done.
The particular language of a man who paid attention and then quietly acted on what he noticed without making you feel like a project or a problem he was solving. She had not expected to encounter that language again. She had made a kind of peace with not expecting it. The peace was becoming harder to maintain. It was on a Tuesday, 3 weeks after she'd arrived that Crane came back.
He came in person this time, which she had not expected. And he brought the county deputy with him, which she also had not expected. And the deputy's name was Hol, and he was a man in his 50s with careful eyes and the manner of someone who had learned a long time ago not to assume he knew what was going on in any given situation. Martha was in the kitchen when she heard the horses and she went to the window and saw a crane in the yard and her stomach went cold. She untied her apron.
She folded it. She put it on the counter and went to her room and came back with the ledger and her bag of receipts. Silas was already outside by the time she reached the porch. Mr. Boon Crane was saying he was a well-fed man of 46 with the kind of face that looked respectable from 20 ft and calculating from five.