That. So, it wasn't even poisonous, Henry offered as if this detail mattered greatly. Just a garter snake. But Miss Hartley screamed so loud the horses got spooked. From the front of the wagon, where she sat rigid beside her father, Clara spoke for the first time since the church.
"I don't want to talk about Miss Hartley." "I was just saying, Henry." One word sharp as a slap, and the boy fell silent immediately, folding back into his blanket like a flower closing at dusk. Eleanor studied the girl's back, the stiff set of her small shoulders, the way she held herself like an adult, carrying burdens no 10-year-old should carry. She recognized that posture.
She'd worn it herself these past 3 weeks. The posture of someone who has learned that softness gets punished and so has decided never to be soft again. "I'm not here to replace anyone," Eleanor said loud enough for Clara to hear over the wind. "Not Miss Hartley, not anyone else who came before. I'm only here to help with the house, and if that's not wanted, I gave your father my word.
It'd only be a week." Clara didn't turn around. "Good," she said. "Because it won't be." Nathaniel's jaw tightened, but he said nothing, keeping his eyes on the road ahead.
And Eleanor understood in that silence just how many times he'd already had this exact conversation with his daughter, and how tired he was of losing it. The Carter ranch house sat low against the horizon smoke, curling weak from a chimney that had clearly gone untended too long. Eleanor took in the sagging porch step, the shutter hanging by one hinge, the general air of a place that had once been cared for and now was only being survived in. Inside wasn't much better. Dishes sat stacked in a basin gone cold.
A layer of dust coated the mantle above a cold hearth. The kind of neglect that came not from laziness, Eleanor understood immediately, but from grief so heavy it left no room for anything else. It's not much, Nathaniel said, setting her suitcase down just inside the door. Been meaning to get to some of this. Just haven't had the hands or the time.
How long has it been? Eleanor asked. Since their mother. 3 years this spring. He didn't elaborate.
And Eleanor didn't push. Some griefs a person carried in private, no matter how plainly they showed on the walls of a house. She set to work before she'd even taken off her coat, because working was the only thing that had kept her upright. These past weeks. The only thing that quieted the voice in her head that whispered, "She was worthless, unwanted, a debt already paid and discarded."
She scrubbed the basin. She swept the floor. She found flour and lard in the pantry, and had biscuits rising within the hour, the smell filling the small house for the first time in what Eleanor suspected was longer than 3 years. Henry hovered near the kitchen doorway the entire time, watching her with the same unblinking attention he'd shown in the wagon. Clara disappeared upstairs the moment they arrived and did not come back down.