"She'll come around," Nathaniel said, appearing in the doorway with an armload of firewood. "Give her time." ""I'm not asking her to come around to anything."" Eleanor wiped flour from her hands. "I told you, one week." But even as she said it, she wasn't certain she believed it herself. There was something about the quiet ache of this house, the particular loneliness of a family stuck mid grief with no one to guide them out of it, that made her own loneliness feel less like a wound and more like a language she and this family might unexpectedly share.
Dinner that night was a quiet affair. Clara came down only when called aid in silence and excused herself the moment her plate was clean. Henry, by contrast, asked Eleanor no fewer than 11 questions about Boston, about trains, about whether she'd ever seen the ocean, about whether biscuits in Boston tasted different than biscuits in Wyoming, until Nathaniel finally told him to let the woman eat in peace. "It's all right," Eleanor said. "I don't mind."
After the children were sent up to bed, Nathaniel lingered at the table, turning his coffee cup slowly between his hands. "I owe you an apology," he said. For Clara. She's not always so. "You don't owe me anything."
Eleanor began clearing the plates. She lost her mother. I understand grief better than most, Mr. Carter. I won't hold a child's pain against her.
Most women wouldn't be so patient. Most women haven't had everything they loved taken from them in the space of 3 weeks. The words came out sharper than she intended, and she immediately regretted the rawness in them. I apologize. That wasn't "Don't apologize for the truth."
Nathaniel set his cup down. You've got every right to be angry. Anger doesn't put supper on the table. Eleanor stacked the last plate with more force than necessary. Anger doesn't keep a roof over anyone's head.
I learned that in Boston. Feeling something doesn't change anything. Only work does. Nathaniel watched her for a long moment. Something unreadable passing behind his eyes.
That's a hard way to live. It's the only way I know how these days. The week passed faster than Eleanor expected. Each day filled with enough labor that she fell into bed too exhausted to dwell on the wreckage of her old life. She mended curtains.
She reorganized the pantry. She taught Henry his letters in the evenings. The boy proving quicker with his numbers than his words delighting in every small victory. Like it was a grand achievement, Clara remained distant, though Eleanor noticed small things. The girl lingering a moment longer at the table before excusing herself the way she'd taken to reading in the front room instead of hiding upstairs close enough to overhear Eleanor and Henry's lessons without ever admitting she was listening.