On Sundays they would all hang out at the farm, playing card and board games that Mr. Pettinger bought for them. He seemed very fond of Monopoly and Yahtzee and the games became very animated with lots of shouting and laughter. The girls had never played board games with shouting and they found it added an exciting component.

Marlin tried out the fanciest recipes she could find for their Sunday dinners. Mr. Pettinger said he couldn’t possibly cadge dinner without paying them back so whenever he came over he fixed whatever needed fixing, leaky pipes, hanging gutters, broken screens, and once when he caught Natasha sitting on a kitchen chair at the living room window watching the birds, he brought over some lumber and built them a window seat, which Miss Webster covered in a bench cushion she made herself with a fabric arrayed in bluebirds.

“For happiness,” she said as she laid the cushion down and they all exclaimed over it. “Against all odds this is the happiest place I can ever remember being.”

Fiona knew part of Miss Webster’s happiness stemmed from the fact that Mr. Pettinger was there. But it was also true that despite all odds, there was a peace that seemed generated from the farm, as if it existed deep in the soil and emanated upward. Perhaps it was the quality of the quiet; the sounds that they heard there were all peaceful sounds. She might be anxious about their continuing welfare but there was a lovely, slow elegance to these spring days, fragrant with fruit blossoms and sunbaked pine needles. Every morning she woke to the joyful sound of birds announcing the sunrise and every night she fell asleep to the mad chirping of the tree frogs, sounding the plea for mates. It was as regular and right as the rising and setting of the sun and moon. Or the ingoing, outgoing rhythm of the tides. And if Miss Webster and Mr. Pettinger would only hurry and marry and adopt them, they would never have to worry again. And even if they didn’t, their happiness as they were now was an unexpected state of being.

Her mother was wrong, thought Fiona, feeling disloyal even as she thought it, but she did. You can be both joyful and fearful. You can be in awed peace and suffer at the same time. You can have all things happening at once. It doesn’t need to be one or the other. In fact, knowing she could have both at once made Fiona feel like she could breathe. She didn’t have to strain for the joyful. She didn’t have to kick out the fearful. She could just greet the day as it was.

After Mr. Pettinger built the window seat and the girls had expressed surprise at his carpentry skills he said that he had grown up in a cabin in the Yukon, a hundred miles from anyone else, and if you didn’t know how to do something yourself you had to learn fast. He and his brothers and sisters could do all kinds of things, carpentry, plumbing, fishing, trapping, farming. Sometimes the girls would hang out with him while he fixed something and then he would insist on teaching them how to do it.