It was a plain name. It suited him. I want to tell you something and I need you to hear it as information, not as complaint. "All right?" "I am not the woman from Abilene," she said, and I am not whoever it was who stayed on the stagecoach.
I am not going to make you a decision by Friday and then disappear on Saturday. She paused. But I need you to understand that I came here for a job, not for She stopped, chose her words with care. Not for anything more than what was advertised, even if it wasn't advertised honestly. "I understand that," he said. ""Do you?"" He turned and looked at her in the dark.
"Miss Bennett." "Clara." He stopped. ""I'm not asking you to love my children. I'm not asking you to be their mother." I know what I advertised, and I know what I didn't, and I know what that makes me."
His voice was steady, but there was something underneath it that wasn't. "I'm asking you to stay long enough to give this house a chance to function. That's all." Clara looked at him. In the dark, he looked less like a man bracing for something and more like a man who had been bracing for a very long time and was tired all the way through.
"All right," she said. "All right," he repeated. They sat for a while longer in the two chairs on the porch, not speaking, while the night settled around the ranch and the stars went on being excessive, and the horses in the corral moved and settled. Then Clara stood up and said good night and went inside. She lay in the bed with the clean quilt and the braided rug and the window that looked out over the back pasture, and she stared at the ceiling and told herself she was here for a job.
It was the third time she'd told herself that. She was starting to notice how many times she had to keep saying it. By Thursday morning, the house had changed. Not dramatically, not in any way that a stranger walking in would have noticed, but Clara noticed because she had been paying attention to the specific texture of the silence in this house from the day she arrived, and the texture had shifted. The dishes were done before she came downstairs because Emma had done them.
Luke had located a second egg-laying hen that had apparently been staging a private revolt in the back corner of the barn and reported this discovery with the satisfaction of a general who has found a critical supply line. Jacob had without comment fixed the porch board that had been warped away from the frame. She had come outside one morning to find him there with a hammer and nails working with the focused economy of someone who had decided to do a thing and was doing it. Noah had started talking, not to everyone, but to Clara. He would appear beside her at unexpected moments and deliver observations in the serious deliberate way that 4-year-olds deliver observations as if each one has been held in storage and considered carefully before release.
On Wednesday, he had told her that the gray horse was his favorite because it was the most honest. She had asked him what made a horse honest. He had said, "It always looks at you the same way, no matter what." She had thought about that for the rest of the day. On Thursday, he appeared beside her while she was taking sheets off the line and said, "Emma cried last night."
Clara paused with a sheet in her hands. "Do you know why?" "She thought I was asleep," Noah said. "I wasn't." "Did she say anything?"
"She said she missed Mama." He looked at the sheet Clara was holding. "She misses her all the time, but she doesn't say it where Papa can hear." Clara lowered the sheet slowly. "Why not?"