He was quiet. You don't have to say anything about it, he said. It wasn't angry. It was just already decided. I know, she said.
I won't. A long pause. My husband, she said eventually, without looking at him, talking more or less to the middle distance. He was sick for two weeks before he died. I sat with him every night.
I knew every remedy I knew. I'd sent for the doctor. I'd done everything anyone could do. She paused. He still died.
And for a long time I kept going back over it. What if I'd sent for the doctor sooner? What if I'd made him rest earlier? What if I'd caught it a week before? She paused again.
It took me a long time to understand that there's a difference between what you did and what happened. You can do everything right and still lose people. And you can go over it forever and it doesn't change the ending. Ethan said nothing. She stood up and brushed hay off her skirt.
"That drawing book under your mattress," she said, and she heard him go very still. "I wasn't looking for it. I saw it when I changed the bedding. I'm sorry for the intrusion." She moved toward the barn door.
"I think you should take it out and use it, but that's your business." She went back inside. 3 days later, she found a sketch on the kitchen table, a drawing of Sam done in pencil, careful and detailed and alive, with the particular quality of someone drawing someone they love. It was propped against the salt cellar, where she would find it, and no one had signed it. She put it on the shelf beside the clock without saying anything.
She caught Ethan looking at it at supper that evening, and she did not acknowledge it, and he did not acknowledge it, and that was, she felt, the correct way to handle it. It was during the second week that she understood what the kitchen truly was to this family. She had seen it already in pieces, the way Sam appeared there before anyone else in the morning, as though proximity to the stove was proximity to warmth in some larger sense. The way Thomas and Daniel turned up ostensibly for water, but stayed usually for the noise and movement. The way even James, 17 and doing his best to be self-sufficient and grown, had a habit of coming through just before supper and finding small excuses to linger.
But she understood it most clearly one morning when Nate came in before the children were up earlier than usual, the light still gray outside, and stopped when he saw her already at the stove. She was making biscuits, nothing complicated, the kind of thing her mother had made every morning of her life with the same unhurried attention she brought to everything. Nate stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the stove and did not move. "I can come back," she said. "No," he said.
He came in and sat at the table, not his usual chair, which was at the head, but the one to the side, closer to the stove. He sat and folded his hands on the table and said nothing. She went back to the biscuits. The kitchen was very quiet, just the stove and the sound of the dough and the gray light coming in through the window. After a long time, Nate said, "Eleanor used to make biscuits on Fridays."