Not posed, not formal, just caught in the middle of a meal, Thomas and Daniel arguing, Luke with his book, Sam with his enormous serious eyes, James at the end, Mabel at the counter, Nate with his coffee cup, and Clara at the stove with her back to all of them, but somehow present in every part of the drawing, the way the center of something is present even when you're looking at the edges. It was the best thing he had ever drawn. She looked at it for a long time. "Can I keep this?" She said.
"I made it for you." He said. She looked up. He had his mother's eyes, she thought, or rather he had the eyes his mother had described when she told Nate that Ethan felt things more deeply than the others. The kind of eyes that see everything and record it and carry it, and that are sometimes a burden and sometimes a gift, and are always always worth protecting.
"Thank you." She said. "You fixed us." He said. It was very quiet.
Very direct, entirely without decoration. "No." She said. "You were already trying to fix yourselves. I just showed up and helped."
He almost smiled. "That's what fixing is." He said. She put the drawing on the shelf beside the clock, next to the drawing of Sam he had left there months ago, and it stayed there, and everyone who came into the kitchen saw it, and no one moved it, because some things find their place and stay. The wedding was on a Saturday in November, and the morning of it, Clara sat on the edge of her bed, the bed that would not be hers alone after today, and held Robert's photograph.
She looked at his face for a long time. "I'm happy." She told him. "I want you to know that, not instead of missing you, not because missing you has stopped, but alongside it. Both things at once."
She paused. "You always said I was too practical to believe in grace, but I think that's what this is. I think somehow I ended up exactly where I was supposed to be, and I think you'd have liked it here." She set the photograph back on the shelf beside the herb seeds she had never needed because she had already planted them, and she stood up and smoothed her dress and went downstairs. Sam was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.
He was wearing his good clothes and his collar, which he had put on without complaint, which told her how seriously he was taking the day. "You look very nice," he said with the gravity of an official opinion. "Thank you," she said. "So do you." "I know," he said entirely without vanity.
"Clara, yes, after today you're really ours," he said. "Not just staying, actually ours." She crouched down to his level. "Sam," she said, "I've been yours since the day you told me." He thought about this.