The next morning, Olive Penn came to the cottage.
Mrs. Penn was sixty, broad, and direct in the way of women who have run an inn for twenty years and have no time left for soft words. She did not knock and wait. She knocked and entered, the way a person enters a place she intends to do business in, and she set her reticule on the table with a thump.
"Sylvia," she said, "I want twelve pies a week for the inn. Every week, through the winter. Apple, berry, and whatever else you have that will stand up to a hungry traveler. I will pay on delivery, in coin, and I will send my boy for them on Thursdays."
Mrs. Marlowe stared at her. Twelve pies a week was more than she baked for the whole valley in some weeks of the year before. It was a standing order, the kind that made a kitchen into a business and a woman into something the town had to reckon with.
"Twelve is a great many," Mrs. Marlowe said carefully.
"Twelve is what my guests eat," Mrs. Penn said. "They come off the train cold and tired, and your pie is the first kind thing that has happened to them since the last town. I will not have them fed on store crackers while a woman two streets away bakes like you do. So. Twelve. Can you do it, or shall I ask the bakery in Helena?"
Ned, who was shelling peas on the porch again — it seemed he was always shelling peas, but peas were honest work and gave a boy time to listen — held his breath.
Mrs. Marlowe looked at her oven, at her flour bin, at the order book, and at Ned's father, who had come to the door with a hammer in his hand and sawdust on his shirt.
"I can do it," she said, "if I have help, and if the help is paid fair. I will not take on twelve pies and do them badly, and I will not take on twelve pies and break myself doing them well."
"You will have help," Mrs. Penn said. "You have a valley full of people who owe you suppers. And you have that man at your door with a hammer, who looks as though he could build you a second oven before the snow flies if someone asked him properly."
Martin Vale colored, but he did not look away. "I could," he said. "I have built worse things with less."
"Then it is settled," Mrs. Penn said, and she wrote the order herself in the order book, in a large, firm hand: *Penn Inn — twelve pies weekly, Thursdays, paid in coin.* She underlined it twice, as if daring anyone to cross it out.
That night, after the children were in bed, Ned lay awake in the room he shared with his sisters and listened to the grown-ups talking on the cottage porch. He was not supposed to listen. He knew he was not supposed to listen. But the walls of the empty house beside the cottage were thin, and the night was still, and his father's voice carried in a way it did not in the daytime, when there were hammers and children and pies to cover it.
His father was telling Mrs. Marlowe about the surveying work.
He had been a railroad surveyor before he came to Copperton, before the children, before everything. He spoke of lines run across prairie in summer heat, of chains and compasses and bench marks cut into stone, of sleeping under wagons and eating cold beans and learning to read a country by the way water ran off it. He spoke of it the way other men spoke of a first home: with pride, and with a grief underneath the pride, because the work had ended when the railroad moved on and the money moved with it.
"I was good at it," he said quietly. "I could look at a piece of ground and see where the line wanted to go, the way you can look at a pantry and see what pie wants to be baked. And then the line was finished, and there was no more line, and I was a man with a skill nobody in the next town needed."
"And then?" Mrs. Marlowe asked. She did not rush him. Ned had noticed that about her: she never rushed a person who was telling the truth.