Owen's cot had an extra blanket tucked in at the foot, and two things on the small shelf above it that appeared to be toys. A carved wooden horse, and something that looked like it had once been a rabbit made of felt, and was now mostly a memory of one. Caleb stood in the doorway of the bunkhouse and looked at what had been done to a room he'd been ignoring for 3 years. Mara came up behind him and stood beside him and looked, too. "I hope that's all right."
She said. "The curtains." "It's fine." He said. "I can take them down if "It's fine."
He said again, and meant it, and walked back to the house before she could see whatever was on his face. Mara cooked like someone who took it personally. Not personally in the sense of pride, though there was pride in it. It was more that she understood cooking to be a form of argument against difficulty, a way of insisting that things could be good even when they weren't easy.
Every meal she put on the table was that argument made concrete. Even when the supplies were down to the basics, she found ways to make the basics mean something. A pot of beans became something with depth and flavor because she knew what to put into the pot and when. Bread came out of the oven with a crust that cracked right.
Potatoes went into the skillet with whatever fat and seasoning was available and came out tasting like they'd been intended to taste rather than simply filling space. Caleb found himself sitting at the table a few minutes before meals were ready, which was something he'd never done when he was cooking for himself. He'd eaten standing over the stove because it was faster or sitting at the desk because it was convenient, and either way it had been purely functional. Fuel going in so that work could continue going out.
Now he sat at the table. Sometimes Lucy sat across from him and talked about whatever was in her head, which was usually either a question she'd been saving up or an observation about something she'd noticed, delivered with the same gravity she gave to everything. Sometimes Owen climbed up next to him and leaned against his arm with the unconscious ease of a child who hasn't yet learned to ask permission before being affectionate. The first time Owen did that, Caleb went very still.
Not because it was unwelcome, because he hadn't expected it, and the unexpectedness of it opened something in his chest that he wasn't prepared for. Some door he'd thought was rusted shut swung open by the simple weight of a small boy leaning against his arm at the supper table. He didn't say anything. He just sat there and passed Owen the bread and let the moment be what it was.
Mara, across the table, was looking at her plate, but he caught the edge of something in her expression before she looked down. Not pity, not sentimentality, just a kind of quiet recognition. The look of someone who sees a thing and makes note of it without making a production of it. He respected that.
He respected it enough that it made him slightly uncomfortable, which was its own form of information. The whispers in Blackridge were doing what whispers in Blackridge always did, which was grow. He heard about them third hand, the way you always heard about things in small communities, from Margaret Danner, who delivered the information in the form of a report rather than gossip, which was her particular way of maintaining a distinction she considered important. "People are talking," she said one morning when he came in for the week's supplies.