Chapter 19 Christmas Morning
She woke to snow.
Not the expected snow, the ordinary Colorado December snow that had been coming through the month in its various intensities.
New snow, the particular quality of overnight snow that transformed the familiar into the version of itself it was when it was most entirely itself — the valley white and specific and entirely quiet, the mountains wearing the new snow on the upper slopes and the creek bank showing the marks of its own running in the white on either side.
She stood at the kitchen window with her coffee and looked at it.
She thought about the first of December, when she had arrived in this valley with her two trunks and her carpetbag and the letter from Mr. Crane and the eleven weeks of savings and no plan except the plan to see the property and decide.
Twenty-four days. The property was hers and the decision was made and the community had absorbed her and the man was coming at eight.
She had brought the Christmas gifts from her sewing box. She had made them in the evenings of the fourth and fifth weeks, the part of the evenings after the property notebook and before sleep, with the focused pleasure of work that was for specific people rather than for general purpose.
For Nora: a small carrying case for the notebook, made from the good leather she had found in McKinley's, sized exactly for Nora's notebook, with a strap. She had tooled a small N into the corner.
For Clara: a length of blue-green silk that she had been carrying in her trunk since Kansas City, kept for something right. She had been waiting for the right person and had found her.
For James: gloves. She had made gloves before, had always liked the precision of glove-making, the way each piece had to be exactly right for the fit to be right.
She had used the same good leather as the notebook case, cut and stitched with the care she brought to things made for a specific person.
She had embroidered the inside of the right cuff with a small apple tree. Four stitches of brown thread for the trunk, spreading into the branches, no leaves because it was winter. The tree as it was now, bare and waiting for spring.
She thought: he will know what it means. He does not need it explained.
He arrived at eight with the snow still coming down in the light way of snow that has said what it needs to say and is finishing the sentence.
"Snow," he said.
"I see it," she said.
"The creek will run high in March," he said.
"I'll note it," she said.
He came in and they had Christmas morning coffee with the specific warmth of the established morning, the thing that had been building since the second day and was now simply what the morning was.
She gave him the gloves.
He turned them over. He found the apple tree. He was very still for a moment.
"The right cuff," he said.
"For the hand you reach with," she said.
He looked at the small embroidered tree. The trunk and the bare winter branches. The tree as it was now, patient with its waiting.
"Holly," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"I want to say something," he said.
"Say it," she said.
"I came to this valley four years ago," he said, "with the specific intention of not needing anyone.
I had needed someone specifically and she had died and I had decided, not consciously but thoroughly, that the specifically-needing was too costly and that the managed version was sufficient.
" He looked at the glove with the apple tree on the inside.
"And then you arrived and stood under your uncle's tree and decided to stay, and in a month of mornings you have made the managed version look like what it is, which is insufficient.
" He looked at her. "I want more than the professional arrangement.
I want the whole thing. I want to court you properly and I want, eventually, if you'll have me, to marry you.
I am saying this on the thirty-sixth day of knowing you, which is not very long, and I am aware of this, and I am asking you to know my intention clearly even if the timeline is not clear. "
Holly looked at the man across the kitchen table from her. She thought about the thirty-six days. She thought about the something she hadn't thought of yet. She thought about the apple tree and what her uncle had understood when he planted it.
"I also want the whole thing," she said. "I have been wanting it since approximately the twentieth day and have been sorting it since, and the sorting is complete and the answer is yes."
"Yes to the eventual," he said.
"Yes to all of it," she said. "When the time is right."
He looked at her across the table with the full-eyes expression, the specific expression of a man who has been given something real.
"Not yet," she said. "We have more to learn. But yes."
"Yes," he said. "That's enough. That's everything."
She picked up her coffee. He picked up his.
Outside, the Christmas morning snow was finishing itself, the valley white and specific and the mountains doing their thing.
The apple tree in the kitchen garden was bare and waiting.
In the spring it would bloom, and in the fall it would fruit, and the year after that they would stand under it together as the people it belonged to, and everything would have arrived at its right arrangement.
For now: Christmas morning, coffee, the established morning, the whole thing agreed to and waiting for its time.
It was sufficient.
It was, in fact, more than sufficient.
It was everything.