In a few minutes, Kate heard hoofbeats.
“She watched Pa for me. This is Peter,” Ned said, and pulled a younger man closer, one with the same blond hair and build, but vacant blue eyes, with the same dark rim around lighter blue, but none of the intensity. “He does the best he can, most days.”
“Hi, Pete,” Katie said, and got a vague smile in return.
The rancher indicated the next room. “This is the sitting room.” He held his hands out, as if measuring the space. “I can build you a room right here. There won’t be a window—that would make it too cold.”
She followed him through the next connecting room. This room had a bed, and crates stacked on top of each other for clothing. “Pete and I sleep here. Wait. I’ll see how Pa is.”
She stood there, Peter beside her. He cleared his throat.
“Ned was looking for a chore girl.”
“He found one.”
“You can cook?”
“Pretty much anything you want to eat, Peter,” she told him. “You do like to eat, don’t you?”
Pete nodded, and then looked away, as if that was too much conversation.
She looked through the connecting arch to the next room, where Ned stood looking down. She went closer and saw Daniel Avery.
He was so thin, and probably not as old as he looked. She had already observed that the men out here had lots of wrinkles on their faces, sort of like sea captains from back home.
“Pa, this is our chore girl, Katie Peck,” Ned was saying. “She’ll be looking after you, after all of us, I guess.”
The older man looked at her, then carefully turned himself toward the wall. Kate sighed, wondering what it must feel like to be strong one day, then brought low by a heart ailment another day.
“Never mind, Mr. Avery,” she said. She touched his arm, then pulled the blanket a little higher. “I am here to help and that is all.”
“Don’t need...” the old man began, then stopped. His shoulders started to shake. “...help.”
Kate quietly left the room. Ned followed her, his expression more troubled than she wanted to see.
“I was afraid he might do that,” he said in apology. “He knows we need you, but his dignity...”
“Doesn’t matter,” she assured him. “You hired a chore girl and I will do my job.”
She said it quietly, as she said most things, as she had lived her own hard life that bore no signs of getting easier. She looked down at her hands, surprised to see that she still carried the doorknob and hinges. She knew other people must have epiphanies now and then—the minister said so—but she never expected one of her own. Here it came, filling her with peace. She handed the hardware to Ned Avery.
“I can do this,” she told him. “Just watch me.”
Kate began her work in the morning, after a surprisingly comfortable night in the bed usually belonging to Pete and Ned Avery. Ned had insisted on changing the sheets the night before and she was glad of it, considering how dingy they seemed.
His eyes wide with surprise, Pete watched his brother make the bed. “He never tucked in anything before,” he told Katie.
Ned had turned around with a smile. “I can’t even trust a brother to watch my back,” he said. “Pete, you’re toast.”
Pete laughed out loud. Something in Ned’s eyes told Kate that no one had laughed in the Avery household in recent memory.
“No respect whatsoever,” Ned said with a shake of his head. He gathered up the nearly gray sheets, put his hand on Pete’s neck and pulled him from the room, but gently.
There wasn’t any privacy, not with the rooms connecting the way they did. As Ned tended to his father’s needs, she winced to hear Mr. Avery insisting that no chore girl would ever touch him.
“I don’t know how long it will take, but he’ll come around,” Ned had told her as he put on his coat. Katie heard the doubt in his voice. “Come on, Pete.”
I have many things to prove to Mr. Avery, Kate thought. She began in the kitchen, laying a fire in the range, a black monstrosity that, like everything in the house, needed a woman’s touch. She knew there would be Arbuckle’s and a grinder; soon the aroma of coffee spread through the house. She made a pot of oatmeal. By the time the brothers opened the door, ushering in frigid air with them, toast was out of the oven and buttered, and the oatmeal in bowls.
She stood by the table, her hands behind her back, pleased with herself, even though the meal was many degrees below ordinary.
“Don’t stand on ceremony,” Ned said as he sat down. He dumped the milk from a bucket into a deep pan and covered it, after taking out a cup of milk. “Join us.”
“I can wait until you are done,” she said.
“Maybe you could if you were the czar of Russia’s chore girl. I mean it. Get a bowl and join us.”
She did as he said. He pushed out the empty chair with his foot.
“Barn’s getting cold and Pete isn’t much fun to cuddle,” he said, as he took a sip of the coffee, nodded and raised the cup to her in salute. “Damn fine, Katie Peck. I’m going to build you a room today.”
And he did, after instructing her to move what little furniture the sitting room possessed to the other side of the doorway arch that cut the room into roughly two-thirds and a third. She did as he directed, coughing from the dust she raised.
“The only problem I have noticed with housework is that five or six months later, you have to do it all over again,” he commented, gesturing for Pete to pick up the other end of a settee.
Once the furniture was moved and the floor swept, Ned worked quickly, measuring and marking boards he had dragged from the barn with Pete’s help. When he gave her no assignment, Katie decided to tackle the stove, which hadn’t seen a good cleaning in years.
She found a metal pancake turner in the depths of a drawer of junk and scraped away on the range top until her shoulders hurt. All the time, Ned and Pete walked back and forth, bringing in more boards. After the fifth or so trip, Ned stopped to watch.
“Funny how this stuff built up and I continued to ignore it,” he told her, sounding more matter-of-fact than penitent, which scarcely surprised her. She was coming to know Ned Avery.
“A little attention every day—not much, really—keeps the carbon away,” she said, and surprised herself by thinking, Kind of like people.
“Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll surprise you. No peeking, now.”
She stopped long enough at noon to fix everyone jelly sandwiches and canned peaches, then continued into the afternoon until the stove
