“Good luck, Miss Bell.”
Clara looked around the dark front room.
Luck had rarely been assigned to her.
Work, however, she knew how to do.
She gave herself ten seconds.
Ten seconds to feel the loneliness of the house.
Ten seconds to hear the wagon roll away and understand there was no easy leaving.
Ten seconds to remember that she had been unwanted before and survived it.
Then she rolled up her sleeves.
The kitchen was a battlefield after everyone had already lost.
Dishes sat stacked in gray water. A skillet held grease gone rancid. Flour had spilled across a shelf and mice had tracked through it. A pot on the stove contained the remains of something that might once have been stew, now filmed over with white mold.
Clara opened the back door and let the freezing air cut through the stink.
She hauled out spoiled food.
She scrubbed the pot with sand until her fingers ached.
She swept mouse droppings from the corners, washed dishes, stacked them clean, and set water to boil. By the time the kitchen looked less like a warning and more like a room, the light had thinned outside the windows.
She found flour, salt, beans, coffee, and one hard end of bacon wrapped in cloth.
Enough.
Not much, but enough.
She made biscuits and beans and fried the bacon so thin every scrap counted. The smell climbed through the house better than any summons.
Small footsteps creaked above.
Clara did not call out.
Hungry children came slower when they were used to disappointment.
At last she went upstairs.
The first bedroom held two boys.
The older one stood beside the bed, stiff-backed and suspicious. He was nine or ten, thin as a rail, with his father’s gray eyes and the hard stare of a child who had been forced too early into watching for danger.
The younger boy lay beneath a dirty quilt, cheeks flushed, hair damp against his forehead.
Clara crossed the room and touched his brow.
Fever.
The older boy stepped forward.
“Don’t touch him.”
Clara withdrew her hand.
“What’s your name?”
“Silas.”
“And his?”
“Ben.”
“How long has Ben had that cough?”
Silas lifted his chin.
“He’s fine.”
“No, he isn’t.”
The boy’s eyes flashed.
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know fever when I feel it. I know a cough sitting deep in the chest. And I know children don’t get better lying in filthy bedding.”
Silas looked ready to hate her.
Clara did not blame him. Children who had already lost too much often defended what remained, even if what remained was harming them.
“There’s food downstairs,” she said gently. “Warm biscuits. Beans. Coffee for your father, milk if I can find any worth drinking.”
Silas’s expression shifted at the word warm.
Behind him, Ben stirred.
“Biscuits?”
Clara nodded.
“Fresh ones.”
The little boy’s cracked lips trembled.
Silas helped him sit, wrapping the quilt around his shoulders. Clara moved to the next room.
A girl sat by the window with a book open on her lap. She was perhaps eleven, with tangled brown hair and a dress hanging awkwardly on her narrow frame. The book was upside down.
Clara noticed.
The girl knew she noticed.
Neither mentioned it.
“Food is ready,” Clara said.
“I’m not hungry.”