Six Months She Served His Family Without Pay — The Day She Stopped, the Cowboy Came Running

Chapter 7

She stayed through the fifth month because leaving required her to decide that everything she had built here mattered less than the twenty dollars and the talk in town, and she could not yet make that calculation come out right.

It was not the work. She had done harder work for less consideration in every position before this one, and she had carried it without complaint because that was the bargain a woman made when she had no household of her own. What held her was something slower and harder to name — the particular weight of having been somewhere long enough to know all the ways a day could go wrong before breakfast, and having learned how to head most of them off.

The way the stove drafted on windy mornings and needed the damper pulled to keep the fire even. The loose board on the third stair that would wake Eli if you stepped on the center of it, so you learned to step to the left. The east door of the barn, which did not close properly and had to be lifted slightly at the latch, or the wind would take it during a storm and the racket would keep the cows off their milk for two days.

These were small things. But small things were what a house was made of, and she had learned all of them in the way you learn things you intend to use, and somewhere in the learning they had stopped being a job and had become a habit of caring she could not yet account for.

Eli had his schoolwork out on the table most evenings now, arranged beside the lamp in a way that meant she was expected to look at it. His sums were improving — that was fact, recorded in the margin of her attention the way the accounts were recorded in the copybook. She had begun leaving small notes in the margins of the harder problems, not corrections but redirections, the way you place a stone in a creek to change the direction of the current. He would read them and then do the problem again without being asked, and put a small mark at the top of the page when he was satisfied with it. She did not tell him to do this. He had invented it himself, the way he had invented the stones, the way he had invented everything that mattered to him since his mother died.

The sixth month turned, and the sixth stone appeared on the windowsill, and then the letter came from Abilene.

Mrs. Carrie, Maren’s former employer, wrote in a neat round hand to say that her sister in Lawrence needed a housekeeper and would pay six dollars a month in cash, with a private room, every other Sunday free, and, she added, underlining it twice, no ambiguity whatsoever about the terms. The letter smelled faintly of cedar from the box where it had been stored before posting.

Maren read it twice, sitting on the edge of her bed in the upstairs room with the curtain moving in the evening draft. Then she set it on the bureau and sat looking at it.

Six dollars a month was half again what she was owed here. A private room was dignity. Every other Sunday free was the promise of a life that had a little air in it. And the terms were written and certain, not subject to the interpretation of anybody’s silence.

She sat a long time with her hands folded in her lap.

She was not a woman who made decisions emotionally. She was a woman who made decisions arithmetically, and the arithmetic had finally, after six months, come out on the side of leaving.

She could not remain where she was not valued enough to be paid. Staying without wages for one month had been an act of reasonable trust — people had difficult stretches, and she had understood that, and she had been willing to believe the matter would right itself. Staying for two had been patience. Staying through six — through the stones and the copybook and the boy who set her place at the table without being asked — had become something she did not have a comfortable name for, something that lived in the space between faith and foolishness and looked from the outside exactly the way Mrs. Caldwell had implied it looked.

Maren Cole was not going to become that woman. She had survived more than a Kansas winter. She had survived widowhood at twenty-eight, two lost positions, and the long particular loneliness of being competent inside someone else’s house. She knew how to survive this too. She would do it cleanly.

She would tell him at supper. She would speak plainly, the way he preferred. She would thank him for the work and say nothing whatsoever about the money, because she had worked for this man for six months and she knew better than to hand him a grievance in the same breath as an exit — it would only make the leaving ugly, and the leaving did not need to be ugly. It needed only to be done.

She would go to Lawrence, where she was wanted, and where being wanted had been set down in writing at a wage of six dollars a month.

She folded the letter and returned it to its envelope and set it in the pocket of her trunk, and she stood up and smoothed her dress and went downstairs to start the supper, because the day was not finished yet, and there was still bread to set and accounts to write and a boy in the kitchen who needed feeding, even if she was going to break his heart tomorrow.