And when Nate came in from the fields that evening and saw them there, he sat down without being asked and read through everything she had prepared. She kept her back to him and kept cooking. She heard him turn pages. She heard him stop at certain places and be still for a moment before continuing. When he finished, he said, "This is thorough."
"It's accurate," she said. "Same thing in this case," he said. He paused. "You put it in order for Aldridge." "Yes.
He'll understand it. Any man who runs our bank will understand it," she said. "Numbers are numbers." "Clara," he said. She turned.
He was looking at the papers, not at her, but his hand was flat on the table beside them, and she recognized that gesture by now. It was what he did when he was working towards saying something that cost him something to say. "I don't know how to stop." "Try it again." "3 years I've been carrying this operation alone."
"Every decision, every problem, everything that went wrong. There was nobody to" He stopped again. "I forgot what it felt like to have someone in your corner." The kitchen was very quiet. "You have someone now."
She said. He looked up at her then. She held his gaze and did not look away and did not qualify it and did not give him anything to retreat from. Just the plain fact of it, offered without condition. He nodded once.
He gathered the papers carefully and went to the study. She turned back to the stove and found that her hands were completely steady, which seemed important to notice. Wednesday morning came cold and clear, the first real suggestion of autumn in the air, and Nate had the wagon ready before Clara had finished pinning her hair. She came outside and he helped her up without being asked, which he had done every time since the social, and which she had stopped remarking on inwardly because it had begun to feel simply like how things were. James had the ranch for the day.
He'd received his instructions the night before with the quiet competence of a 17-year-old who had been functioning as second in command for 3 years and took the responsibility seriously. "Keep Sam out of the barn." Nate told him. "He'll go in the barn." James said.
"Keep him out of the loft." Nate amended. "I'll do my" James said, which was honest. They rode to town mostly in silence, which was their natural shared language, by now a silence that had shifted from the careful quiet of two strangers trying not to demand too much of each other into something easier. The kind of quiet that doesn't require explanation.