Martha allowed herself one small exhale of relief once he was gone, and then she went back to work. She heard him find the coffee pot. She heard water. She heard the particular sound of a large man moving around a kitchen that he clearly used, but did not particularly know the searching sounds, the moving of things. She focused on the axle fitting and tried not to think about whether this was going to work, whether he was going to accept her, whether the next thing out of his mouth when she came back up was going to be some version of I was expecting someone else.
She'd been told that before, not always in those exact words, but the meaning was always the same. She was not what people expected, and people did not always recover from the surprise of her. Her husband, Henry, had never been like that. From the first day they met, Henry had simply looked at what she could do and decided that was the thing that mattered. She had loved him for it so completely that 2 years after his death, the grief still lived in her chest like something that hadn't learned yet that it was supposed to leave.
She seated the new pin with the correct torque and checked the fitting twice. Then she worked her way back out into the morning. The sky was full pink now, the mountains turning from shadow to color, and the air had that particular sharp cold to it that came before the sun cleared the peaks. Martha stood up slowly, pressing one hand to her back, and walked around to check the wheel from the outside before she was willing to call it done. Silas was standing in the cabin doorway with two tin cups of coffee.
He held one out when she came toward him. She took it. The warmth of it went straight through her hands, and she wrapped both palms around the cup and breathed the steam in before she drank. "We safe," she said. "You can load the run.
I already loaded it last night." Sila said. Martha looked at him before I found out about the pin. He looked at the wagon and there was something in his expression that she thought might be the beginning of a man understanding that he'd come closer to something bad than he'd realized yet. "Come look at something," Martha said. She walked him around to the fitting she'd repaired and showed him where the scratches were.
Not the wear patterns of a pin that had worked itself loose over time and miles. Clean scratches. Recent scratches. The kind of scratches you got when someone was deliberately removing a component and replacing it with something else. Silas crouched down beside the wheel and looked at what she was pointing to.
And the silence coming off him changed quality again. Who did this? He said it wasn't a question the way she'd asked her question. It was quieter than that and somehow more serious. I don't know yet, Martha said.
But that's the second thing I'd like to talk to you about. After breakfast, he stood up. He was looking at her differently than he'd looked at her when he first came out and found her in the dirt. She couldn't entirely read what the difference was, but it was there. You're full of things you want to talk to me about, he said.