The woman handed her back without ego.
Sometimes the baby slept against the woman’s chest.
Sometimes she crawled after a wooden spoon.
At one point she vomited on the Apache woman’s sleeve.
The father expected disgust.
Instead the woman looked down.
“Your mother warned me.”
He stared.
“About what?”
“That babies are mostly fluids with opinions.”
The father burst out laughing.
He remembered his wife saying exactly that.
The woman smiled.
The dead wife entered the room again.
But this time it hurt less.
Only slightly.
Enough.
By the end of the week, the Apache woman had come every day.
Not full days.
Three hours.
Four.
Once six because the father had to meet a hay supplier in town.
She refused money.
He became irritated.
“You are working.”
“No.”
“You’re caring for my child.”
“Yes.”
“That’s work.”
“Not in the arrangement we currently have.”
“What arrangement?”
“Friend helping friend.”
“We’re friends?”
She smiled.
“Not yet.”
“Then you’re contradicting yourself.”
“Fine.”
“Friend of your wife helping her stubborn widower.”
He grimaced.
“That’s worse.”
“More accurate.”
On day eight, he put an envelope on the table.
Cash.
She pushed it back.
He pushed it toward her.
She looked at him.
“If you turn this into employment, you get to tell me when to come.”
He stopped.
She continued:
“You get to decide duties.”
“Hours.”
“Expectations.”
“You need reliable childcare.”
“I understand.”
“But I’m not ready to become that.”
The father’s frustration gave way to something more honest.
“Then what are you?”
She looked toward the baby sleeping in a playpen.
“I’m still figuring that out.”
He wanted certainty.
She refused to manufacture it.
Strangely, that kept her there.
The first real conflict came from the late wife’s mother.
She arrived unannounced on a Thursday afternoon.
The father’s mother-in-law had visited often after the funeral.
Then less.
Grief made the ranch hard for her.
Every room contained her daughter.
The kitchen.
The porch.
The nursery.
Even the horse trough because the late wife once painted it blue and refused to let anyone repaint it after everyone said blue looked ridiculous.
The older woman loved her granddaughter fiercely.
She also loved her dead daughter so much that change felt like betrayal.
She walked into the living room and saw the Apache woman sitting on the rug with the baby.
The child was laughing.
The grandmother stopped.
“Who is this?”
The father came from the kitchen.
“I was going to tell you.”
“That is never a good opening.”