Then she looked at Caleb and said, "Good night." It was the third thing she had ever said to him. She went into the back room and climbed into bed, and Lucille followed her and pulled the quilt up, and the house was quiet. Caleb sat by the stove. He did not do the math.
He looked at the drawing on the wall, the cup on the sill, the lamp in the window throwing light out across the porch and into the yard. He thought about seven children on a platform, a woman in a dark dress, a choice he had made in less than an hour that had cost him everything he could count and given him everything he could not. In October, Ruth Ames came to supper. She brought news about Thomas. She brought a letter from Edmund in haze.
She brought a sack of flour and a tin of coffee and a pair of shoes for Bess that were the right size, which meant she had been paying attention in a way that went beyond what the society's ledger required. Lucille set a fourth plate at the table. She put it between Caleb's place and her own, and she set it down with the same care she used for everything. As though the placement of a plate was a decision that mattered, Ruth Ames sat in the fourth chair and looked at the table and the kitchen and the drawing on the wall and the cup on the sill, and she did not say anything about the fourth plate, or what it meant that a 5-year-old girl had set it there as though it had always been missing. They ate supper.
Lucille talked about the wheat and the cat and the school in town that would open in November. Bess held her cup in her lap and ate her food and listened. Ruth Ames told them that Thomas had been placed with a family in Council Grove and that the family had a garden and two goats and a woman who had lost a son the year before and wanted another one and that Thomas was well. After supper, Caleb walked Ruth Ames to the porch. The night was cold and the stars were out and the wheat was cut and the fields were bare and the first frost was coming.
She said, "I requested the Topeka office because it was closer." He said, "Closer to what?" She said, "You know what?" They stood on the porch in the dark and neither of them moved and the lamp light from the kitchen window fell across the boards between them. And from inside the house, they could hear Lucille putting Bess to bed, the small voice saying good night, the creek of the mattress, the sound of the quilt being pulled up.
Ruth Ames said, "I have placed 112 children in 3 years. I have watched families choose, and I have watched families fail, and I have written it all in my ledger and closed it and moved to the next town. I do not get attached to the placements. Caleb said, "But," she said. "But I keep coming back to this one."