She looked up. "I can go myself," she said. "I know you can." "Then why" She stopped.
She looked at him for a moment, reading whatever was in his face. "How bad is it?" She said quietly. "It's nothing," he said.
"How bad?" She said again, in the same tone. He looked at his plate. "Uh" "Some people have opinions," he said.
"They always do. It doesn't change anything." She was quiet for a moment. Lucy and Evan were at the other end of the table, Lucy explaining something to Evan in a detailed whisper that he was half listening to.
And Owen was working on his potatoes with both a fork and his fingers, which nobody had managed to entirely stop him from doing. Mara looked at her children and then back at Caleb. "I've had people have opinions about me before," she said, "since I was widowed. The kind of opinions people have about a woman alone with children who hasn't managed to disappear properly."
She said it without heat, just as fact. "It doesn't change what we're doing here." "No," he said. "It doesn't."
"Good," she said, and went back to her supper. That was the end of it, as far as either of them made it anything. Evan broke his wrist on a Tuesday. He was on the roof of the equipment shed, fixing a section of shingles that Caleb had been meaning to get to since September, and he came down faster than intended when his boot slipped on a patch of frost that had no business being there at noon.
He landed wrong on his right hand, and the sound was the kind of sound that stops everything. Caleb heard it from the paddock and was across the yard before he'd fully processed what the sound meant. Evan was sitting up when he got there, which was a good sign, but his face was the color of old paper and his right arm was held against his chest at an angle that said what had happened clearly. "Let me see."
Caleb said. "I'm fine." Evan said. "You're not fine. Let me see."