Chapter 11 The Commission Completed
The dress was finished on the eleventh day.
This was three days ahead of Mercy's estimate, which had been conservative because she had not yet known the extent of Clara Caldwell's patience as a fitting subject, which was considerable.
Clara stood still while being measured and pinned with the focused stillness of a woman who had decided that the thing was worth her complete cooperation and was providing it without requiring to be asked twice.
This made the fitting work go faster, which was the primary reason the dress was done early.
The secondary reason was that Mercy had worked late on the ninth and tenth evenings, in her room at Mrs. Connelly's, by lamplight, because sewing in the evenings had always been her most focused time and also because working with her hands occupied enough of her attention to let the rest of it sort through things that needed sorting.
There was a great deal that needed sorting.
She had ten years of professional practice and a clear record of the kind of woman she was and the kind of life she wanted and the kind of thing she was looking for in the right place.
She had thought she knew what the right place would feel like.
She had not entirely anticipated how specific it would feel — how much it would feel like a particular place rather than the category of right place.
She had not anticipated Pinecrest, specifically.
She had not anticipated the Caldwell ranch and Clara's directness and Nora's theology and Clem's observation that the people who stayed were the ones who understood that difficult and worthwhile were not opposites.
She had not anticipated Nathaniel Horne, who was neither what she had been looking for nor not what she had been looking for, but was something she had not known to look for, which was different again.
She pinned the last seam of the dress on the morning of the eleventh day and stepped back and looked at it on the dress form and thought: this is good work.
The navy linen had done what she had known it would do, which was to be exactly itself in the most flattering version of itself, the honest quality of good cloth responding to honest work.
Clara came in and looked at it.
"Yes," Clara said. Just that.
"Try it on," Mercy said.
Clara tried it on and stood in front of the glass and looked at herself in the way that women sometimes did when they were looking at a version of themselves they hadn't yet seen — not vain, not uncertain, just: taking it in. "It's exactly right," she said.
"I know," Mercy said. "The linen is honest. It says what it means."
"So do you," Clara said.
Mercy looked at her. Clara was looking at the mirror, not at her, but the reflection could see both of them, the woman in the navy dress and the seamstress behind her with her pins.
"Yes," Mercy said. "I try to."
"The curtains are hung," Clara said. "The commission is done. You could go back to Columbus."
"I could," Mercy said.
"Will you?" Clara said. She was still looking at the mirror.
Mercy sat down on the chair beside the dress form and thought about this carefully. She was a person who gave careful answers because she respected the people she gave them to.
"I don't know yet," she said. "I have more of Colorado to see. I have a letter from a client in Denver who has a commission — two daughters' wedding trousseaux, which is a significant undertaking. I could take it or I could not take it."
"What does the taking or not taking depend on?" Clara said.
"On whether there is sufficient reason to stay in this part of the state rather than moving on," Mercy said.
Clara turned from the mirror and looked at her directly. "Is there?" she said.
Mercy met her gaze. "I think so," she said. "I'm not yet certain it's sufficient. But it's there."
Clara nodded. The nod of someone who has received an honest answer and is satisfied with its honesty if not its completeness.
"For what it's worth," Clara said, "I would like you to stay. Nora would like you to stay. Elias has said nothing on the subject, which for Elias constitutes active advocacy."
Mercy laughed. She had come to appreciate Elias Caldwell's specific quality of expression.
"And the sheriff?" she said.
"The sheriff," Clara said, turning back to the mirror, "came to my kitchen three days ago to talk about you. He did not talk about you directly, but he talked about a question you had asked him and about a door he thought he had closed."
Mercy was quiet for a moment. "What did you tell him?" she said.
"To stop defending," Clara said, "and see what happens."
Mercy looked at the navy linen dress and the woman wearing it and the mountains visible through the bedroom window and thought about stopping defending and seeing what happened.
"That's good advice," she said.
"I know," Clara said. "I've given it before."
* * *
She did not go to supper with him that evening.
She had the impulse and she set it aside, not because she was playing any strategy — she was not a strategic person in the social sense — but because she wanted to think clearly about what was happening before she allowed more of it to happen, and thinking clearly required some separation from the thing she was thinking about.
She took her supper at Mrs. Connelly's and went to her room afterward and opened her Bible and read for an hour and then set the Bible down and looked at the ceiling and thought.
She thought about the right place. She thought about the specific quality of Pinecrest — not just the mountains, which were extraordinary but were also just mountains, features of a landscape, things that could be found elsewhere if not identically.
The people. The specific combination of people who happened to be here at this moment: Clara with her directness and her organized mind and her completely inhabitable life.
Nora with her eight-year-old theology that was sounder than most adult theology she had encountered.
Elias with his eloquent silences. Clem with his sixty years of watching people and his patience with all of it.
And Nathaniel. Who had been at Gettysburg and had drawn one conclusion and spent twenty years inside it, and who had full eyes and a horse with opinions about authority and who had asked her to supper twice and had stood in the dark under the stars and let her see him — not the managed version, not the professional version, but the version that was a man who had lost something specific at a specific moment and had been managing the absence ever since.
She thought: I have been looking for a place that makes me present in the way my father was present. I have been looking for it for three years and I have found, in Pinecrest, the closest thing I have encountered.
She thought: the place is not sufficient by itself. The place is necessary but not sufficient. The other thing — the person — is also necessary.
She thought: I am thirty years old and I have been alone by choice and by circumstance and I have not, up to now, found the person who was both necessary and possible. I have found necessary people who were not possible and possible people who were not necessary.
She thought: this one might be both.
She thought: I should be careful about that conclusion.
She thought: I have been careful for thirty years and I am very tired of it.
She set the Bible on the bedside table and blew out the lamp and lay in the dark and thought about a man standing next to her under Colorado stars who had said I know that about you in the voice of someone who had paid attention and intended to keep doing so.
She fell asleep thinking this was either the beginning of something or the evidence of insufficient caution.
She was not, in the morning, certain which.