On the fifth day after she decided to stay, Noah came into the kitchen while she was kneading bread dough and stood beside her and watched for a while. "Miss Bennett," he said. "Noah, are you happy here?" She kept working the dough. Her hands pressed and turned and pressed.
"I think I'm getting there," she said. He considered this with great seriousness. Then he reached into his pocket and placed a small, perfect pine cone on the edge of the counter beside her. "That one's for getting there." He said and left.
She stopped kneading. She stood there with flour on her hands and a pine cone on the counter and the summer heat pushing through the window and she was not going to cry about a four-year-old's pine cone. She was absolutely not going to do that. She pressed the heel of her hand into the dough and got back to work. It was Luke who found the trouble first.
He came running into the kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon. It was the second week of July now the heat at its most serious and he was moving at a speed that Clara had learned meant either great excitement or actual emergency and the look on his face ruled out excitement. "There's a man at the gate." He said. "What kind of man?"
"A suit man." Luke said, "with a buggy. He's asking for Papa." Thomas was in the south field. Clara wiped her hands on her apron.
"Where's Jacob?" "With Papa." She went to the front of the house. The man at the gate was perhaps 55 dressed in town clothes that were too heavy for the weather and wearing the expression of someone who considered that other people's discomfort with his presence was their problem, not his. He had a leather case across his knees and a driver holding the reins of a very clean buggy.
He saw Clara come onto the porch and his expression shifted into the particular professional pleasantness of a man who has learned to use pleasantness the way other men use tools. "Good afternoon." He said. "I'm looking for Thomas Callahan." "He's in the field."
Clara said. "Can I ask your business?" "My business is with Mr. Callahan." He smiled.
"I'm Harold Reese from the Red Valley First Bank." Clara kept her face exactly where it was. "I'll send for him." She said. "Would you like to wait?"
"That would be fine, yes." She sent Luke running to the south field and went back to the kitchen and stayed there because the kitchen was where she lived and the front porch was not her territory and she had learned early in life that a woman who overreached her territory gave other people permission to question her being there at all. Thomas came in from the field 20 minutes later. She heard the screen door and then his boots on the kitchen floor stopping beside the sink. "You know what he wants."