"You are thin," Clara said at last.
"I was fed chicken by a station agent in Colorado," Martha said. "It is a long story."
"It had better be," Clara said, "because you are going to tell it to me walking home, and then you are going to tell it to me again at supper, and then never again."
They walked home through streets Martha did not know, past houses with gardens still green in October, and Martha told the long story — the berth, the brooch, the conductor's certainty, the platform at Alder Creek at midnight, Emma and the stove and the telegraph key, the wires, the drawing room — and Clara listened the way Clara had always listened, without interrupting, and at the end she said, "That porter," and Martha said, "Thomas Avery," and Clara said, "That is a name to remember," and Martha said, "I know."
The house was small and white with blue shutters, and the spare room had a quilt on the bed and a desk under the window, and on the desk Clara had put a vase with three late roses in it, because Clara believed that a room prepared was a kind of promise. Martha unpacked her suitcase — the suit, the blouses, the library book, finished now, the folded napkin — and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment with her hands in her lap, and then got up and went to look at the street from the front window, and thought: here. This is the next place. The school was four blocks away, a brick building with a flagpole, and her classroom was on the second floor with windows facing east, and the principal had written that the fifth grade was hers if she wanted it, and she wanted it.
The weeks that followed had the shape of all beginnings: too much to learn and not enough hours, and then, gradually, the shape of a life. The children were children — loud, quick, merciless, tender — and by Thanksgiving she knew all twenty-eight names and which ones needed watching and which ones needed leaving alone, which was the whole of teaching, really. On her third day a boy named Tommy — small for ten, with ink on his fingers — stayed after the bell to tell her, in the confidential whisper children use for the most serious things, that he had not done the arithmetic because his father said arithmetic was for people who could not do real work, and Martha had said, "Then we will have to prove your father wrong together," and Tommy had nodded as if a treaty had been signed. By the second week he was doing long division at the board with his tongue caught between his teeth. On her desk that Friday someone — she never learned who — had left an apple, polished to a shine. She ate it at her desk after the children went home, looking out at the empty playground, and thought about Dayton, and did not cry, which surprised her. Clara's kitchen became the center of her evenings. She wrote to Emma at Alder Creek in November, a short letter, because she did not yet have the words for the long one.
The long letter from Denver came in the second week of December, in an envelope with the railroad's name printed in the corner, and Martha knew what it was before she opened it, and sat down at Clara's kitchen table to read it properly. It was from Mr. Dillard. It was written the way she imagined he did everything: plainly, in order, without ornament. He wrote that Raymond Kessler had been charged at Denver with the season's thefts from the sleeping cars — not only Mrs. Vance's jewel case but five others, worked the same way, on the same trains, all season. He wrote that the case had been recovered entire from the linen hamper, complete in every piece, except for the brooch's one night in a wrong berth, which the insurance people had made a great fuss about and which had not harmed the brooch at all. He wrote that the brooch had been returned to Mrs. Vance at Chicago, and that Mrs. Vance had asked him to tell Mrs. Ellison that she had worn it to church the Sunday after, and thought of her. He wrote that the railroad had settled the matter of the drawing room internally and that Mrs. Ellison would receive no bill, now or ever, and that he remained, respectfully, hers.
Folded inside his letter was a smaller sheet, and on it, in a careful hand that had clearly taken its time, four lines.