Her mother's recipe notebook, a small framed photograph of Robert taken 6 months before he died. Three seed packets she had saved from her kitchen garden because she could not bear to leave them in the ground for strangers to neglect. Dora had hugged her at the station with real warmth and genuine relief in equal measure. "You'll write." Dora said.
"I'll write." Clara said. She stepped onto the train and did not look back. She had learned by then that back only made the distance harder. The train ride from Billings to Red Willow Creek took most of a day, crawling through country that opened and flattened until the sky became the largest thing in the world.
And everything else, towns, trees, her own small life looked temporary beneath it. She watched it all through the window with the quiet attention of a woman who had learned to study things carefully before she trusted them. She was 31 years old. She had been married for 7 years. She had buried her husband alone because there was no one else available to stand beside her.
She had held his hand through 2 weeks of fever, and then she had let the neighbor women come in and prepare him while she sat outside in the cold because the house had become something she could not breathe inside of. She was not fragile. She wanted to make sure of that before the train arrived. She repeated it to herself the way she had repeated recipes in her mother's kitchen when she was a girl quietly, steadily, until it became something reliable. She was not fragile.
She had simply used up everything she had. The man waiting at the station was not Nathaniel Holloway. He was a boy or close enough to one, perhaps 16 or 17, tall and broad through the shoulders in the way boys get just before they finish becoming men. He had dark hair pushed back from his forehead and his father's eyes, which Clara did not know yet, but would come to recognize later as something the Holloway children all carried, a particular kind of watchfulness. As though they had learned early that the world required paying attention to.
He held a piece of paper with her name written on it in large, careful letters. Clara Whittaker. The letters were slightly uneven, like someone had been trying very hard to write neatly and had not quite succeeded. She walked toward him, and he straightened up fast, the way young men do when they're not sure whether to tip their hat or offer their hand or simply stand still and hope for the best. "Mrs.
Whittaker," he said. "That's right," she said. "And you are?" "James Holloway, ma'am. I'm the oldest."
"Pa sent me because he couldn't leave the cattle," he said matter-of-factly, without apology, and she appreciated that. There was no performance in it, just information. "Of course," she said. "Thank you for coming." He reached for her bags without asking, which she also appreciated, and carried them to a wagon hitched to a patient-looking roan mare at the edge of the platform.
He helped her up with a formality that suggested someone had recently instructed him on manners, and then he climbed up beside her and clicked the mare forward without ceremony. They rode in silence for a while. The town passed behind them. She caught glimpses of a general store, a church with white paint peeling at the corners, a saloon that looked like it had been the first building built and hadn't been touched since. Then the town ended and the country opened up again, all grass and summer heat and the sound of the mare's hooves on the packed earth road.
"How many brothers and sisters did you say you had?" Clara asked eventually, because she felt the silence becoming the kind that required filling. "Six, James 17. Then there's Mabel, she's 16. Then Ethan, he's 14.