Chapter 11 The Third Week
By the third week the mornings had acquired the quality of something established, which was that they happened without being arranged.
He came at eight. She had coffee. They sat at the kitchen table or they walked or they addressed whatever the day's specific challenge was, and the telling-Holly-things quality of the early sessions had shifted into something more mutual — he told her things and she told him things and they argued productively about the practical questions and agreed when they should and held their positions when they should.
She had found, over three weeks, that he was better to argue with than most people.
Not because he conceded easily — he did not concede unless the concession was warranted and he was precise about when it was and was not — but because he argued in the way she preferred, which was: to the point, with evidence, without the social management that some men brought to disagreements with women, the management that was about the being right rather than about the question.
She had been managed in this way before.
Her previous employer — the one who had eliminated her position — had been a man who was never wrong in the room but who was frequently wrong in the ledger, and the management had been the way he navigated the distance between the two. She had found this exhausting.
James was not exhausting. He was occasionally frustrating — specifically in the moments when he had the information she needed and assumed she would arrive at it herself rather than giving it to her, which she had identified as the habit of a man who had learned mostly by doing and assumed learning by doing was the natural mode — but he was not exhausting.
She had told him this on the eighteenth day, directly: "You withhold sometimes. You let me work toward the answer when you have it. I would prefer you give me the answer and let me understand it rather than discover it."
He had looked at her. "I was taught by doing," he said.
"I learn faster by understanding than by trying," she said. "It's a different kind of mind. Neither is better. They're different."
He had been quiet for a moment. Then: "All right," he said. "Tell me when I'm doing it and I'll give you the direct version."
She had thought: most people would have argued about this. Most people would have said learning by doing is the right method, or would have agreed and then continued to withhold because the habit was too deep. He had said all right, and he had changed.
She noticed this.
She was noticing many things about him that were not the practical information he was giving her, and the noticing was accumulating in the way that noticing accumulated when it was about something you were paying attention to rather than something you had decided to pay attention to.
She had not decided to pay attention to James Breck. She had simply found, over three weeks of daily proximity, that she was.
* * *
On the twentieth day, Nora Caldwell arrived at the Vance place with her horse and a basket of the Christmas cookies that Clara had been making and her notebook under her arm.
Holly had been warned about Nora's visits in the general sense — Clara had mentioned them, and Helen Granger had mentioned them, and even James had said: if Nora Caldwell comes to see you, that means you've passed whatever test she applies to new arrivals — but she had not been warned about the specific quality of Nora in person, which was that she was exactly as comprehensive as advertised and considerably more interesting.
She stayed for two hours. In two hours she consumed three Christmas cookies, gave Holly a thorough account of the animal intelligence research and its conclusions, asked Holly seventeen questions about Kansas City and the account work and the inheritance and the specific feeling under the apple tree, and delivered three observations that Holly subsequently thought about for the remainder of the day.
The first observation was: "James Breck is different since you came.
He comes to Clara's more. He sits further forward at the table.
Last month he sat at the end. Now he sits in the middle.
He said three things at dinner last week that were not practical.
He said something about the light on the south hills in the mornings and he quoted something he had read and he said that he thought Clem was wrong about the mule situation, which is not a new opinion but he said it like it was worth saying, which is different. "
The second observation was: "The Vance place looks different with someone in it. It looked like it was holding its breath before. Now it looks like it's exhaling."
The third observation was, delivered as she was leaving with her horse and her basket and her notebook: "Something I haven't thought of yet is a very good principle.
Uncle Harold used to say it. Papa says it sometimes now, about the south pasture.
I say it about the mule situation, which is ongoing.
It means the problem has a solution even if I don't know it yet, which is useful because most problems do. "
Holly stood in the doorway of her house and watched Nora ride home through the December afternoon and thought about all three of these observations and what they suggested about the situation she was in.
She thought about James sitting in the middle of the table.
She thought: none of your business, Holly.
She thought this with approximately the conviction she deserved, which was not enormous.
* * *
He did not come on the twenty-first day.
She noticed this at eight-thirty, which was when she noticed that he was not there, and she made a note of having noticed it and then applied herself to the day's work, which was reorganizing the storage in the barn according to the system she had developed from three weeks of learning what was used most and what was used least and what the workflow of the barn actually was versus what the existing arrangement assumed it was.
At noon a note arrived from the Breck property, delivered by one of his hands: a problem on the north fence, he'd be over the following morning.
She read the note and understood it was practical and that the not-coming was about the fence and not about anything else, and she put the note with the farm papers and continued with the barn.
She found, at some point in the afternoon, that the barn reorganization was not occupying her attention as fully as it should be occupying her attention.
She found, in the evening, that the house was quieter than it had been on previous evenings.
She found, in the morning when he came at eight with the explanation of the north fence problem and his assessment of the repair required, that the kitchen had a different quality with him in it than it had without him.
She added all of this to the pile of things she was sorting and turned the conversation toward the fence repair, which was the practical matter at hand, and was entirely present for the conversation while the sorting continued in the background.
She was good at parallel processing. It had always been one of her professional strengths.