"Pa's sister came the first summer and stayed 6 weeks and cried every morning and went home to Denver. A woman from the church answered the first advertisement Pa put out. She lasted 9 days. 9 days, Clara said. She said the boys were too loud, Mabel said with a flatness that was not quite contempt but was adjacent to it.
That's fair, Clara said. They are quite loud. Something shifted in Mabel's face just briefly, barely, and then it was gone. I'm not leaving, Clara said quietly and without particular emphasis, the same way she might say the water's getting cold or we're almost out of soap. Just a fact.
Mabel handed the last dish. You've been here 6 hours, she said. Yes, Clara said, and I'm still here. She set the dish on the shelf and hung the drying cloth and said goodnight and went upstairs to the small room that would be hers, plain walls, a narrow bed, a single window looking out toward the barn, and she sat on the edge of the bed and did not cry. She had told herself she would not.
She unpacked her mother's recipe notebook and her photograph of Robert and her three seed packets and placed them on the small shelf beside the bed. She looked at Robert's photograph for a long moment. I'm all right, she told him, which was not the same as being fine. But she had learned to tell the difference. The next 2 weeks were the most demanding of her life.
And that was saying something considerable given that her life had included a 7-year marriage to a man who had farmed difficult land through difficult weather until the difficult land and difficult weather had finally finished him. The Holloway household ran on a system that was entirely Mabel's, built by necessity, refined by 3 years of repetition, organized around the assumption that no one else would do it correctly because no one else ever had. Mabel did not say any of this directly. She did not need to. It was present in the way she moved through the kitchen, in the route she took between the pantry and the stove, in the small territorial precision with which she arranged things on the shelves.
Clara did not challenge any of it. She watched. She helped where she was permitted. She stayed out of the way where she was not. She learned the children.
Thomas, who was 12, and Daniel, who was 10, were the ones most likely to test something a fence, a rule, a new person, and the most likely to be completely open about it. They challenged her directly in the cheerful open way of boys who have learned that the worst thing that usually happens is they get sent outside. "Can you ride?" Thomas asked her on the third day. "Passably," she said.
"Pa says only passably ain't good enough for this country," Daniel said, clearly repeating something he'd heard often. "He's probably right," Clara said. "I'll have to improve." They looked at each other with the particular look of children recalibrating. Luke, who was eight, was the one she had to watch most carefully for the simple reason that he was always doing something, always moving, always taking things apart or putting them together in the wrong order, always arriving in the kitchen with mud or grease or something unidentified on his hands with an expression of pure innocence.
He was not a bad child. He was a child with more energy than the day could hold, and 3 years without someone directing that energy had let it develop its own geography. She discovered he loved machinery specifically, anything with gears or levers or mechanisms. She mentioned to Nate, carefully and without emphasis, that there was a book at the general store in town she had noticed that might interest one of the boys. "Which one?"
Nate asked. "Luke," she said. Nate looked at her for a moment. "What kind of book?" He said.