Chapter 15 The Decision
The decision crystallized on the fifteenth day, in Mrs. Connelly's kitchen, during a conversation that had nothing to do with the decision.
Mercy had come down for breakfast to find Mrs. Connelly in the middle of a one-sided argument with the stove, which had decided on this particular December morning to be difficult about drawing, and she had taken over the stove management while Mrs. Connelly expressed her opinion of the stove's character and lineage at considerable length.
Mercy had the fire going in eight minutes, which produced in Mrs. Connelly an expression of satisfaction that was directed at Mercy but was really directed at the stove as a kind of victory.
"Fifteen years I've had that stove," Mrs. Connelly said, setting the kettle on.
"It does this every December. It knows when the cold comes and it decides to make difficulties.
" She sat down heavily in the kitchen chair.
"My late husband could manage it. He had a way with it.
Said you had to talk to it nice in the autumn before the cold came and then it behaved all winter.
I never remembered to do it in the autumn. "
"That's a very specific relationship with a stove," Mercy said.
"He was a very specific man," Mrs. Connelly said.
"I've been married twice and widowed twice and the specific one was the second.
The first was a good man. The second was specific.
" She poured the tea. "You know the difference.
The good ones are good. The specific ones are necessary.
You could live without the good ones if you had to.
You couldn't live without the specific ones. "
Mercy sat across the table and held her tea cup and thought about this. The specific ones. The ones that were not generally good but specifically right.
"I think I know what you mean," she said.
"You're thinking about the sheriff," Mrs. Connelly said, with the comfortable certainty of a woman who ran a boarding house and understood that the people in it were living their lives whether or not she was officially watching.
"I was," Mercy said.
"He's a specific one," Mrs. Connelly said.
"Don't let the quiet fool you. The quiet ones are always more specific than they look.
They're quiet because they're full." She drank her tea.
"My second husband was quiet. Didn't say much in a day.
But what he said meant something and when he left there was a Connelly-shaped hole in the room where no one else could fit. "
Mercy thought about this. About a Nathaniel-shaped space.
About the specific shape of him — the way he stood in a room with the contained quality of someone managing their own volume, the way he said the true thing and only the true thing, the way his face changed in the dark under stars, the way he had sung quietly to a hymn about waiting after twenty years of not singing.
"I think I'm staying," she said.
Mrs. Connelly did not look surprised. "I've been leaving your room off the weekly rotation," she said. "In case."
Mercy looked at her.
"Small towns," Mrs. Connelly said, with the comfortable authority of someone for whom small towns were not a problem but a feature. "You want the weekly rate or the monthly?"
"Monthly," Mercy said. "To start."
"Wise," Mrs. Connelly said. "There's a parlor space on the ground floor that would make a good workroom, if you're setting up permanent. I've been using it for storage but storage can go in the shed."
Mercy looked at the woman who ran Mrs. Connelly's boarding house — who had been married twice and widowed twice and understood the difference between good and specific and who had been leaving the room off the rotation in case — and felt the particular warmth of being received by a place.
Not just Nathaniel. Not just the Caldwells.
The place itself, its people, its specific community with its specific character, receiving her the way a place received someone who belonged to it.
"Thank you," she said.
"Finish your tea," Mrs. Connelly said. "Then come help me with the storage situation. If you're going to be here you might as well be useful immediately."
Mercy finished her tea and helped with the storage situation, and thought that useful immediately was exactly the right approach.
* * *
She told Nathaniel that evening, on the step of Mrs. Connelly's, which was where they often said the important things, as though the step had become their designated venue for the conversations that mattered.
"I'm staying," she said. "Mrs. Connelly is converting the parlor into a workroom.
There's enough work here — the Caldwells and Mrs. Pearce and Helen Granger and the Connelly family itself and several of the other women in the valley who have been making do without a seamstress for years. It's sufficient to build on."
He was quiet for a moment. Not a long silence — just the moment of receiving something important and letting it land.
"Good," he said.
She looked at him. "That's all?" she said.
Something moved in his face. "What would you like me to say?" he said.
"Something specific," she said. "You're a specific man. Be specific."
He looked at her for a long moment. The December evening was doing what December evenings did in the mountains — dark fast, cold, the stars emerging from the blue-black above the peaks.
"I'm glad," he said. "Not glad in the general way that a member of a community is glad that a useful person has decided to stay.
Glad in the specific way that I haven't been glad about anything in a very long time, which is that the specific person who — " He stopped.
He was not accustomed to long sentences on this subject and they were giving him difficulty.
"I'm glad you're staying," he said, "because you are who you are and I want you to be here. "
She looked at him. "That was specific," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Thank you," she said.
She went inside. He stood on the step for a moment longer than necessary — she could hear him standing there through the door, the familiar quality of his stillness — and then his footstep down from the porch, and then his boot on the frozen street, and then the sound of him walking home in the December dark.
She went to her room and sat on the bed and thought: I am staying in Pinecrest, Colorado.
I am going to make curtains and dresses and whatever else the valley needs, and I am going to live in Mrs. Connelly's boarding house with the difficult stove, and I am going to watch a man with full eyes become the person he was before Gettysburg closed the door, and this is what I came here for, even though I did not know I was coming for it.
She thought: the right place feels like this. It feels like a specific man saying I want you to be here in a voice that is not performing anything.
She opened her Bible and read for an hour and the reading was good and the room was quiet and outside the mountains were invisible in the dark but entirely present, and it was the fifteenth of December and Christmas was ten days away and the life was beginning.
* * *
She wrote to the Denver client the next morning.
The letter was professionally written and apologetic in the appropriate way — she could not take the commission at this time, she was establishing herself in a new location, she hoped the client would find another seamstress of suitable skill and offered two names from Denver who she thought capable of the trousseau work.
She sealed the letter and gave it to the post and felt, walking back from the post office in the December morning, the specific lightness of a decision made and executed.
She was not a person who agonized over decisions.
She made them when she had sufficient information and she executed them without looking back, because looking back was not useful and she was a useful person.
The decision was made. She was staying. She had said so to Nathaniel and to Mrs. Connelly and she had written the Denver letter, and now the decision existed in the world rather than in her head, and the world was adjusting to accommodate it.
She thought about her father, who had been in the right place for his entire life and who had shown her what that looked like.
She thought about the quality of his presence — the sense of a man who was fully inhabited, fully himself, fully available to whatever the day brought, because he was not spending any of himself on the maintenance of the wrong place.
She thought: this is what it feels like to be about to be in the right place. The just-before quality of it. The moment when the decision is made and the life is adjusting and the rightness is no longer theoretical.
The morning was cold and clear and the mountains were doing the thing where the December sun hit them just right and turned the snow on the peaks into something that was neither gold nor white but exactly between, and she walked back to Mrs. Connelly's and looked at what would be her workroom and thought about what she was going to put in it and how it was going to be arranged and what the light was like in the afternoons.
The light, she discovered, was excellent.