The kitchen was as the letters had said, too. That was the first thing Linnet noticed when she came in out of the wind, and it stopped her just inside the door with her hatbox in her hands. A long plank table scrubbed white. A cookstove with a nickel rail. A window over the dry sink, and through it, framed as neatly as a picture in a frame, the slope of the rise and the pole fence and the board. And on the wall beside the window a set of new shelves, the wood still pale, with tins and crocks set on them in a careful row, and on the end of the top shelf a coffee tin with a red label, alone.
I have put up new shelves, the letter in August had said. I thought you would want somewhere to put your things.
"Did you put up the shelves?" Linnet asked.
"Nem did," Keziah said from the stove. "In June. I asked him to. I said they'd be handy." She did not turn around. "He didn't know what for."
Nehemiah, coming in behind with the carpetbag, stopped and looked at the shelves as if he had never seen them before.
They ate. It seemed absurd afterward, but they did: they sat down at the white table, the three of them, and Keziah served the hen and the biscuits and a dish of stewed dried apples, and Nehemiah said a short grace in a low voice with his eyes shut, and they ate, because the food was there and it was good and Linnet had not had a hot meal since North Platte. Nobody spoke much. Once Keziah got up to bring the coffeepot and Linnet saw that her hands were shaking so badly she had to set it down on the stove rail and wait before she could pour. Nehemiah saw it too. He got up without a word and poured for all of them, and sat back down, and Keziah sat down too, with her hands in her lap under the table.
When the plates were cleared, Keziah went into the room off the kitchen, the one that had been her mother's, and came back with a pasteboard box that had once held a pair of shoes. She set it on the table in front of Linnet and took the lid off. Inside were Linnet's letters. All of them, the blue envelopes she had bought by the dozen from the stationer on Fifth Street, each one slit neatly along the top with a knife and put back in order, with a slip of paper tucked in each one on which someone had written a date in pencil.
"That's the day each one came," Keziah said. "And the day I answered. I kept track." She sat down across from Linnet and put her hands flat on the table, as if to keep them still. "I'll tell it from the beginning. Nem, you can stop me if I say anything that's not so."
And she told it.