She thought about a man who had come home from a mountain run with pneumonia because a wagon broke down in November and who had died 3 weeks later not knowing that the fitting that failed had been the wrong material installed by a company that knew it was wrong and had done it anyway. He kept honest records. She said he would want them used. Then they will be. Garrett said the formal review hearing was scheduled for 2 weeks out, which was faster than Martha had expected and slower than she could comfortably stand.
And the two weeks between were the longest of her life in a way that had nothing to do with waiting and everything to do with the fact that she was living in Silas Boon's house with feelings she had not asked for and did not entirely know what to do with. He brought her coffee in the mornings. He had been doing it for weeks, and she had been accepting it for weeks, and somewhere in that simple daily exchange, something had settled into place between them that neither of them had named. He sat with her in the evenings when the work was done, reading or looking at the fire, not requiring conversation, but not absent either, just there, which was the thing she had missed most in the two years since Henry died. The particular presence of a person who simply stayed.
She caught herself listening for him. The sound of his boots on the porch. The particular way he moved in the kitchen when he got up before she did on the mornings when she'd overslept. She caught herself listening for him and felt that the familiar complicated thing about that the warmth of it and the fear of it together. The way things that mattered always came with both.
On the 10th day before the hearing, she was in the barn working on a harness repair when he came in and stood in the doorway and looked at her for a moment before he said anything. She looked up. Eleanor's here, he said. Elellanor Boon was exactly what her letters had suggested, a sharp-faced woman of 41 with her brother's dark eyes and none of his tendency toward silence. She had come from Pine Hollow in a hired wagon, and she had not sent word ahead, which Martha suspected was deliberate, the kind of thing a woman did when she wanted to see something unperformed.
She looked at Martha in the barn doorway with the harness still in her hands, and she smiled. "Good," she said simply, Silas said from behind her. "Good, she's working," Eleanor said. "I wrote to her because I thought she was what this ranch needed, and I wanted to see if I was right. I was right.
She came forward and held out her hand, Martha. Elanor Boon, we've corresponded but not met. I know, Martha said and shook her hand. I recognized you from the way you talk. Eleanor looked at her brother.
I like her, she said. I know, Silas said in the tone of a man who had already had this conversation in his head and had not been looking forward to the real version. Eleanor stayed 3 days. She was, Martha discovered, the kind of woman who saw the truth of a situation with a speed that was slightly uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of. And she saw the truth of Silas and Martha's situation by the end of the first afternoon, and spent the following two days saying absolutely nothing about it to either of them, which was more eloquent than anything she could have said.
On her second evening, she sat with Martha at the kitchen table after Silas had gone out to check on the horses, and she said, "He hasn't been this present in years." Martha looked at her coffee. "He used to be here physically and somewhere else entirely in his head," Eleanor said. "He'd sit at this table and look through you." "Not rude. Just gone like a man who's gotten used to there being no reason to pay attention." She paused. "He pays attention now.