He took Harold's old room with the single window that faced east and the braided rug Clara had never replaced, and the low shelf of Harold's books that she'd also never moved, and somehow the room absorbed him without it feeling like an intrusion. Clara noticed one morning, two weeks in, that he'd straightened the books by height and put a small piece of folded paper under the shelf's front leg, which was slightly uneven, the same way she used folded leather under the worktable leg downstairs. She didn't mention it. It meant more to her without words. The house went up in stages, which was the only way a house went up when the man building it was also running a horse operation, managing a growing list of clients from ranches across the territory, and occasionally sleeping in borrowed rooms above a tailor shop.
Ryder had help from Bill Garrett, Tom's older brother, a carpenter by trade who owed Ryder something related to a horse he'd trained and refused to elaborate on, and from two other men who came on weekends for wages, and worked with the particular focused energy of men, who knew the value of a good roof before spring. Clara learned to hand tools. She learned which wood was right for which purpose. Learned to hold a board steady while a nail was driven. Learned that construction had its own kind of rhythm that was not entirely different from sewing.
The same attention to how things fit together. The same unforgiving nature of a seam or a joint that was a quarter inch off. She was not good at it in the beginning. She hit her thumb with a hammer on a Saturday in December and said a word that made Bill Garrett drop his level. Language, Ryder said, not looking up.
I hit my thumb. I know language. It's my thumb. Thumb. I'll say what I want about it.
Bill Garrett found something to attend to on the other side of the structure. Ryder came over, took her hand, looked at the thumb, pressed the edges gently in the way he pressed bruises on horses, assessing, not performing concern. It's not broken, he said. I know it's not broken. You'll want to ice it.
I'm aware of how thumbs work, Ryder. He looked at her, the almost smile. "You want to take a break? " "I want to go back to work," she said. "Hand me the hammer. " He handed her the hammer. She went back to work.
He watched her for a moment with an expression she didn't see because she was looking at the board. But Bill Garrett saw it from across the structure and filed it away and mentioned it to his wife later that evening, who mentioned it to Harriet Bloom, who mentioned it to Mabel Puit, and by the following week, it had taken on a slightly different shape in the retelling. Something about Clara Holloway swearing on a rooftop and Ryder Kain looking at her like she'd hung the stars which was not precisely accurate but was Clara supposed when she heard it not entirely wrong in spirit. The wedding was in April before the house was finished. This was Clara's decision which surprised people who had expected her to wait for the house the way women were supposed to wait for everything.
The right conditions, the perfect timing, the fully assembled future before committing to it. She had spent 3 years waiting for things to be settled enough. She was done waiting. They married on a Saturday morning in the crooked steepled church at the north end of town with essentially the whole of Silver Creek in attendance because the whole of Silver Creek had been personally invested in this development since the morning. Ryder had appeared on the boardwalk with a fictional coat, and the town had recognized something real before either of its participants did.