She was alone in the kitchen. She did not look up immediately when he came in, which she had learned gave him time to decide how to begin. He sat at the table. She kept working. Can I ask you something?
He said. Yes, she said, a pause. Do you think she would have He stopped. Do you think Ma would have minded you being here? You and Pa.
She sat down what she was doing and sat across from him. She looked at him honestly, 14 years old, carrying something that was too heavy for 14, asking a question that deserved a real answer. "I didn't know your mother," she said. "So, I can only tell you what I know of her from what everyone who loved her has told me." She paused.
"And everything I've heard tells me she was a woman who loved her children and her husband with everything she had, and that what she wanted above anything else was for this family to be whole." She paused again. "I don't think a woman like that minds when the people she loved find a way to be whole." Ethan was quiet. "I still miss her," he said.
Not with the careful control he usually kept, just plainly, the way you say a true thing when you've finally decided to say it. "I know," Clara said. "That doesn't go away. It changes shape over time, but it doesn't go away, and it shouldn't. Missing someone who deserved to be loved is not a problem to be solved."
"James doesn't," Ethan said. "James talks about her like she's already like she's just a memory. Something finished." "James carries it differently," Clara said. "That doesn't mean he carries it less."
Ethan looked at his hands. "Pa cried," he said, "the night Sam's fever broke." "I saw him in the hallway. I don't think he knew I was there." "I know," Clara said.
"He doesn't cry," Ethan said. "He never cries. He loved Sam's mother," Clara said. "He loves all of you. Men like your father, they feel everything.
They just don't know what to do with it yet." Ethan was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached into his jacket and put a drawing on the table between them. She looked at it. It was a drawing of the family, all of them, at the kitchen table.