"It would mean leaving," Mabel said. "For stretches. Not permanently, but leaving." "Yes," Clara said. "The boys aren't" Mabel stopped.
Tried again. "They don't need me to run the house anymore." "They have you." She said it without any of the old weight in it. Just fact.
"They have you, and that" She paused. "That's a good thing. I know that now." "It is," Clara said. "And they will still need you.
That doesn't change because I'm here." "A mother doesn't replace a sister." Mabel looked up. "You're not" she started. "I know I'm not your mother," Clara said quietly.
"I'm not trying to be. Eleanor was your mother. She was remarkable by everything anyone has ever told me about her, and that is yours and your brother's, and it doesn't belong to me. She paused. But I am going to be here every day, and that's different from trying to be something I'm not.
Mabel held her gaze for a long moment. You should talk to your father about Billings, Clara said. He'll say yes. How do you know? Because he wants you to have more than this ranch, Clara said.
He always has. He just didn't know how to say it while he was trying to hold everything together by himself. Mabel looked at the list in her hands. She wanted me to be a teacher, she said quietly. Ma, she said I had the patience for it, said.
She stopped. She said I could make people feel like what they knew mattered. She was right, Clara said. Mabel folded the list. I'll talk to him, she said.
Good, Clara said. She watched Mabel leave the kitchen and thought about Eleanor Holloway, thought about a woman she had never met who had seen exactly who her daughter was and named it correctly, and who had trusted, perhaps, that someone would be there to remind her daughter of it when the time came. She hoped Eleanor knew. She thought somehow that she might. The morning Ethan came to her was a Thursday, 2 weeks before the wedding, and she knew from the sound of his boots in the hallway, hesitant, stopping outside the kitchen twice before he came through, that whatever he was carrying had been carried a long time.