"June," he said. "June," she confirmed. He took her hand and walked her to the door, which felt, she thought, like exactly the right way to begin. The ceremony was small, as she had wanted, the family, Martha Greer and her husband, Helen Pruitt, Reverend Marsh, who had the grace to perform it with genuine warmth. The children stood in a line, and Clara was aware of all seven of them the way you are aware of something that is the whole point of the room.
Nate stood at the front, and when she came to stand beside him, he looked at her the way he had looked at her on the September evening when he asked directly, without flinching, with the full and serious attention of a man who means what he does. He took her hand. He said his vows the way he said everything that cost him something slowly, with the weight of someone who understands that words, when they're real, are permanent things. She said hers looking at him, and she meant every word with the particular depth of someone who has lost enough to know exactly what they are choosing and chooses it anyway. When Reverend Marsh pronounced them married, Sam immediately said, "Finally," in a caring whisper that made Martha Greer laugh out loud and made James cover his face and made Nate close his eyes briefly in the expression of a father who loves his child completely and is also, in this particular moment, mildly mortified.
Clara laughed. It was a real laugh, full and unguarded, the kind of laugh she had not known she was missing until it was back. Nate looked at her. He was smiling, fully, finally, without reserve, the smile of a man who has stopped bracing himself against happiness and decided to stand in it instead. He leaned down and kissed her, which was brief and warm and entirely his, and the children made various noises about it that she chose not to catalog.
Afterward, at the table, with more food than any of them could eat and more noise than the kitchen had held in years, Clara looked around at the faces Thomas and Daniel already arguing again. Luke with the engineering book open against a plate he hadn't finished, Ethan quiet and present, James at the end of the table with the easy pride of an oldest child watching his family be whole. Mabel moving between the table and the counter with the fluency of someone who has finally put down something heavy and found her hands free. Sam in his good clothes and his serious collar sitting beside her like a small official ambassador of his own happiness. And Nate beside her, his hand finding hers under the table and holding it not performing anything for anyone, just holding on.
Because she was there and he was there and they had both found their way to the same place through entirely different roads, and the roads were behind them now. She thought about the train platform in Billings, two worn bags, a letter that said sufficient. She thought about everything that word had failed to contain. She pressed Nate's hand and he pressed back. The months that followed were not without difficulty.
Nothing real ever is. There were hard winters and hard decisions and the particular ongoing challenge of raising seven people who were all in their various ways entirely their own persons with their own needs and their own complications. Thomas broke three fences and a window in the spring. Luke's engineering experiments required supervision of a dedicated nature. Daniel and Thomas reached an age where their disagreements required actual refereeing rather than simply presence.
And the grief was still there, not gone, not buried, but changed. Eleanor was still in the house. She was in Mabel's hands and Ethan's eyes and Sam's questions and the way Nate sometimes paused by the window in the evening for no visible reason. Clara did not try to move her out of the house. She had never tried.
She had understood from the beginning that Eleanor was not a presence to be replaced. She was the ground the family had been built on and you do not replace ground. You build on it. What Clara had done, what she continued to do was add to the building. Mabel sat her entrance examination for the teaching certificate in February and passed with a score that made Helen Pruitt write a letter specifically to compliment it.
She told the family at supper and Nate said, "Your mother would have." And stopped. And Mabel said, "I know, Pa." And that was enough for both of them. Ethan's sketchbook filled up.