He started a second one. The drawing that hung beside the clock had been joined by others. A portrait of Nate that caught him exactly. The particular quality of his attention rendered in pencil lines that made Clara stop and look every time she passed it. Martha Greer saw it once and asked who had done it.
And when Clara said, "Ethan." She said she wanted to introduce him to Ann Billings who taught formal drawing classes. And Ethan had gone the color of the kitchen wall and said he'd think about it, which Clara knew meant yes. Sam grew. He grew the way children grow when they are well-fed and secure and allowed to ask as many questions as they need steadily, confidently, with the easy expansion of something that has room.
He started school properly in September and came home every day with things to tell Clara about what he had learned and theories about the things he hadn't yet. And she listened to all of it with the attention it deserved, which was considerable. One evening, a year after she had arrived, she was in the kitchen when Nate came in from the fields and stopped. She turned. He had an expression she knew well by now, the expression of a man working toward something he needs to say.
"What?" She said. "I want to tell you something," he said. "All right," she said. He came to the table and sat, and she sat across from him, and the kitchen was quiet around them, the way it had been that first morning when he told her about Eleanor and the biscuits and the Fridays.
The first real thing he had ever told her about the inside of himself. "When I wrote that advertisement," he said, "I wrote it because I thought what I needed was a capable woman who could cook and manage a household. I thought what was wrong with this place was practical. Something missing that could be supplied practically." He paused.
"I was wrong about what was wrong." She waited. "What was wrong?" He said, "was that we had all stopped believing it was going to get better. We were surviving.
We were functional, but nobody believed it was going to be good again." He looked at her. "You walked in the door, and within it wasn't even weeks, Clara. Within days, Sam came back to himself. Ethan started drawing again.
Mabel started breathing." He paused. "I started breathing." She held very still. I didn't ask for that, he said.
I didn't know how to ask for that. I didn't know what to put in an advertisement that said, "Send me someone who can make my family believe in tomorrow again." I didn't even know that's what I needed. He looked at her with the full direct attention that was his most intimate thing. But that's what you did.