Daniel came to the back door just before supper. He had begun entering that way in spring, after Vera told him a person who worked on the farm as often as he did was no longer required to wait on the front porch like a guest. The sound of his knock was light and familiar, and she called for him to come in without lifting her eyes from the ledger. He removed his hat, hung it by the door, and stood beside the table looking at the open pages. His expression changed when he saw which figures she was studying.
"Well," he said.
"Well," she replied.
"The account?"
"The account."
She turned the ledger toward him. He bent over it, following the columns carefully from top to bottom, then sat opposite her as though the chair had become necessary. The October light reached across the table and touched his hands, broad and work-worn, which had held so many boards steady while she hammered them into place. He looked at the total a second time and let the silence settle before speaking.
"Twelve chicks," he said.
"Twelve chicks."
"Six dollars."
"You appear to have remembered the amount at last."
He shook his head slowly. "I said you'd lost your mind."
"You said to come back in the fall and find out whether you were wrong."
"It's fall."
"It certainly is."
He looked through the window toward the coops and the two barns beyond them. "I was wrong. Not because the birds turned out to be valuable. Because I thought you hadn't considered what you were doing, and I never stopped to ask what you had seen."
Vera considered this. His apology was different from the ones people offered when they wanted an uncomfortable subject put behind them. He was not asking her to forget what he had said. He was telling her exactly where his judgment had failed, and she respected him for making the distinction. She reached across the table and closed her hand over his.
"You came on Saturday at seven with your tools," she said. "After you'd decided you were wrong, you helped me work. That mattered more than the original opinion."
They stayed that way for a moment, then Daniel withdrew his hand gently and looked toward the north window. The fence lines could not be seen clearly from the table, but he knew them as well as she did, and she could almost see the figures rearranging themselves behind his eyes. He turned back to her with the expression she had first noticed in November, the look of a man preparing to speak about something he had avoided too long. She waited without helping him find the words.