She had planned to go directly to her room and read and not think about anything requiring a decision. But she pushed through the screen door and he was there sitting in the old chair at the end of the porch that faced the field and she stopped. "I'll go back in," she said. "You don't have to," he said. She stood for a moment.
Then she went to the other chair. There were two and she did not think about what that meant and she sat down. The night was warm and the stars over Texas were indecent in their quantity just sprawled across everything without any restraint. And the ranch made its night time sounds around them. "The woman from Abilene," Clara said.
"How long ago?" A pause. "Mrs. Greer." "She mentioned it.
Hattie Greer is the most efficient information system in three counties," Thomas said. Not with bitterness. Just with the recognition of a fact. "Nine days," Clara said. He was quiet. ""What happened?"" He let out a breath.
She decided the situation wasn't what she'd been led to expect. "Was it?" His jaw tightened. ""I told her about the children before she came." Before she came. She said she could manage.
She got here and decided she'd been wrong about that and the one before her. Clara said carefully, the one who didn't get off the stagecoach. The silence that followed was of a different quality, heavier. You heard about that? I did.
Jacob knows I know about it, Thomas said. He hasn't said a word to me about it, not once in 8 months. He shifted in the chair. That boy has taken things on that he shouldn't have to carry and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it because I'm the one who put him in the position of carrying them. Clara looked out at the dark field.
He dressed the little ones, she said, and brought them out to the porch. I know. He was protecting them, she said, from being disappointed. Yes. And he was the one who got disappointed instead.
Yes. Thomas's voice was flat and final in the way that a voice gets when a person has gone over a thing so many times there's no emotion left in the telling of it, just the bare fact of it stripped clean. Clara sat with that for a moment. Mr. Callahan, she said.
Thomas, he said. "You can call me Thomas. It's simpler." Thomas. She tested the word.