"You were scared." "I've been scared every Sunday for 3 months," he said with a frankness that sat alongside his usual quietness, like the two things had always belonged together. I kept thinking I was going to do something wrong, say something wrong, that you'd He stopped. You decide it wasn't worth the trouble. You went to Clara Hutchin's property, Margaret said, on my behalf.
That wasn't brave, he said. That was just someone was doing something wrong and I knew it and I was in a position to say so. That's not brave. That's just basic decency. You'd be surprised, Margaret said, how rare basic decency is.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Did she come to you after the festival?" "She came," Margaret said. His jaw tightened slightly. "What did she say?"
"She apologized," Margaret said plainly, without dressing it up. She thought about it. "It cost her something, I could tell." Nathan was quiet with that for a moment. He said, "Chara's not a bad person.
She's just a person who got afraid and made bad choices about what to do with the fear." "That's what I thought." Margaret said, "More or less." He looked at her, then really looked at her, and she held it the full weight of that look, and she thought about 30 years of keeping her face still, and her expectations low, and her wanting small enough to carry alone. and she thought about this man sitting across from her who had been afraid every Sunday for three months and had come back every single time regardless. She said, "Nathan, what is this?"
He said, "I don't know exactly what to call it yet." A pause, but I know what I want it to be. She said, "Tell me." And he did, not with large words, not with promises he couldn't guarantee. He told her about the piece of land beside the ranch that he had been looking at since spring, the abandoned farmhouse on it that needed work.
The work he had been doing quietly for the last 2 months without telling anyone why. He told her he didn't know how to do this right, that he hadn't asked anyone for anything real since Eleanor, that he was out of practice with wanting things and afraid of doing it badly. He told her that his daughters had shown him something he hadn't let himself see. That a house needed someone in it who baked on Sundays and that the someone he kept thinking about was her. He said, "I'm not asking for anything tonight.
I'm just telling you where I am. So, you know." Margaret sat with all of it. The farmhouse, the land, the two months of quiet work, the daughters, the hollow Sundays that had slowly become something else. She said, "I have spent 30 years believing I was too much and not enough at the same time.