He said, "Not because it makes practical sense, although it does. Not because the county will think better of you for it, because you have long since passed the point of needing the county's opinion. Because I find you." He stopped and searched, and she could see him reaching for the word that was accurate rather than the word that was easy. I find you the most fully realized person I have ever encountered. And I would like to spend the remainder of whatever time I have on this earth in the company of someone who approaches everything, every fence post and fair competition and county meeting and ruined barn with that quality of he paused.
Of complete commitment. The kitchen was very quiet. Complete commitment. Eleanor said. Yes, he said.
She looked at him. She thought about the gray horse at the gap in her fence. She thought about cold coffee on a fence rail. She thought about they were wrong and you should enter the fair and the lumber on a convenient pretext and a gash on his arm that he had not considered worth mentioning. Yes, she said.
He let out a breath. That quickly, he said, I've been thinking about it for 6 months, she said. You're only just catching up. Something crossed his face that was the closest thing to genuine surprise she had ever seen on it. Then he laughed, a real laugh, full and unguarded, the kind she had heard from him perhaps three times in 16 months.
Each time filed away in her memory as something worth keeping. She reached across the table and put her hand over his. We'll work out the practical details, she said. I'm not moving off this farm. I know, he said.
I didn't expect you to. And I keep the Whitmore name, she said professionally. This is Whitmore Farm. It should be, he said. It's what it is.
She looked at their hands. All right, she said. Then yes, she said it the same way she had said it in Thomas's dining room to herself, taking the deed. All right. The words of a woman who has looked at the size of something and decided that the size is not a deterrent.
The news of the engagement moved through Willow Creek at the speed that important news moves in small towns, which is the speed of everything, and faster. Ida Marsh received it with an expression of profound personal satisfaction, and said she had seen this coming since September of the previous year, which Eleanor doubted but did not argue with. Ruth cried immediately and without apparent embarrassment and then said she was absolutely not crying, which was the sort of thing Ruth said and then hugged Eleanor for a long time. Frank Alderman shook Benjamin's hand and said, "You are a lucky man." In a tone that communicated he meant it as a serious assessment rather than a pleasantry. Benjamin said, "I know." In exactly the same tone.
Um, Robert Ames, who had apparently heard the news at the feed store, made a remark to someone that got back to Eleanor through Ruth. Something about how remarkable it was that a woman like her had managed to catch a man like Carter. The remark was delivered in the tone of a man who cannot fully credit something that contradicts his prior assessment of the world. Eleanor, when she heard about it, thought of the word catch and its particular implications, and then she thought, "I did not catch anything. I was standing in the middle of 60 acres of honest work and a decent man walked up and decided he would like to be there too.