"We'll see you at the social," Edna said. "I'm sure you will," Clara said. The wagon turned and went back down the road. Clara stood and watched it go and kept her expression entirely neutral until it was out of sight and then she turned back to her garden and knelt down and pulled a weed with somewhat more force than the weed required. She was not angry about what had been said.
She was angry about what had been implied, the particular kind of implication that sticks to a woman like mud, that she had been desperate, that her presence here was something to be watched for impropriety. That 3 years of a man raising seven children alone was acceptable, but a woman coming to help was somehow suspect. She stayed in the garden until she had worked through it. Nate found her there an hour later. James said two women from town came by, he said.
Edna Hargrove and Ruth Marsh, she said. They came to welcome me. He was quiet for a moment. Did they? They expressed concern about the propriety of the domestic arrangement, she said.
She kept her voice even. I told them the children were well and the household was running and sent them off. Another pause. I'll speak to Hargrove, he said. You don't need to, she said.
I know I don't need to, he said. I'm going to. She looked up at him. His jaw was set in the particular way she had come to recognize as Nate at his most decided, the look of a man who has made up his mind and is not planning to entertain counter arguments. It won't help, she said.
It might make it worse. Women like Edna Hargrove need something to say and if you take one thing away, they find another. What do you suggest? He said. It was genuine.
He was actually asking. The social on Saturday. Go, bring the children. Let people see what the household actually looks like. She paused.
That's the only argument that works, evidence. He looked at her for a moment. You're not wrong, he said. "I usually am it," she said. Something moved in his face.
She would have called it amusement if she hadn't known him well enough to know he rarely telegraphed it that clearly. But there was something there, brief and real. "You're also not from around here," he said. "So you don't know yet that Edna Hargrove has run this town's social opinion since her husband's father built the first grain store 20 years ago." "I grew up in a town with three Edna Hargroves," Clara said.