She had meant to go straight to bed, but instead she stepped out into the garden for a breath of air, as she did on clear nights, and stood among Henry's apple trees. They were bare now, their branches black against a sky full of early stars, and the fallen leaves rustled under her slippers. Henry had planted the first of these trees the spring after they married, and he had always said that an orchard was a promise you made to people you would never meet. Sylvia had thought that sentimental at the time. Now, with her hands in her shawl and her breath fogging in the cold, she understood it differently: the trees had outlived the man who planted them, and they fed a woman who had not planted them, and that was not sentiment at all. That was how a life went on — not by holding tight to what was gone, but by eating the fruit of what had been planted and planting something in return. She did not know what she herself had planted lately, besides pies. The thought sat with her, uncomfortable and new, as she turned back toward the cottage with the stars hard overhead.
But that night, after supper — a bowl of soup eaten standing at the stove, because sitting down alone at the table felt like a ceremony she no longer had the heart to perform — she carried her lamp to the front window and looked out once more at the house next door. A thin line of light showed under its door. Not lamplight left burning by accident, but the steady light of someone home, someone settled, someone who had come to stay. Sylvia watched it until the lamp oil ran low, and then she blew out her own lamp and went to bed in the dark, listening to the clock tick and to the unfamiliar sound, from just beyond her garden wall, of a house that was no longer empty.
Martin Vale had not expected the house to be as bad as it was. That was his first thought when the wagon rolled to a stop in front of it, late on a gray October afternoon, and his second thought — hard on the heels of the first, the way second thoughts always came to him these days — was that he had no right to be surprised. The agent in Helena had described the place in the cheerful language of men who sell things by post: sound roof, good bones, room to grow. What the agent had not described was the garden gone to thistle, the porch sagging like a tired mouth, the windows filmed with three years of dust, or the smell inside, when Martin pushed the door open, of damp and mice and abandonment. He stood in the doorway with his youngest on his hip and felt the familiar weight settle on his chest: the weight of having chosen wrong, again, and of having no one left to tell him so.
"Is this it, Pa?" Ned asked from the wagon bed. He was ten, old enough to read his father's face and young enough to still hope the answer might be better than it looked. "Is this home?"
"It is now," Martin said, and he made his voice steady, because steadiness was the one thing he could still give his children without fail. "Come on. Let's get the beds in before dark."
Alice climbed down next, seven years old and solemn as a judge, holding a cloth doll with one button eye. She looked at the house, then at her father, and said nothing, which worried Martin more than any complaint would have. Hope, two years old and heavy on his hip, babbled something about a bird and patted his cheek with a sticky hand. Martin shifted her weight and went to work. There was a stove, at least, and a table with three chairs, and a pump in the yard that gave water after a fashion. He had learned, in the two years since his wife died, to measure a house not by what it lacked but by what it could be made to do. A roof that did not yet leak over the kitchen. A fireplace that drew. A room for the children to sleep in, even if the plaster was cracked. It would do. It had to do. He had spent the last of his railroad savings on the place and the journey, and there was no money left to be particular.