"Why not?" "Because" he stopped. She heard him move behind her, heard him put his hands flat on the kitchen table. "Because asking is" another stop. "Because asking feels like failing."
Clara said without turning around. The silence after that had a different weight. "Yes." He said. She lifted the pot off the heat entirely and turned to face him.
"You have been keeping this house and these children together on your own for 18 months." She said. "You have done it by working yourself down to nothing and borrowing against land you've spent your life building. That is not failure. That is a man who refused to give up."
She held his gaze. "Asking for $60 from a neighbor so a bank man doesn't take your pasture is not failure either. It is sense." Thomas looked at her. He had the expression of a man who has been told something his whole body wants to argue with and can't find the argument.
"Hattie Greer." Clara said. "Does she know everyone in this county?" "Every single one." He said.
"Then start there." She said. "This afternoon." Before that man gets back to town and starts whatever legal machinery he's planning to start. Thomas stood up from the table.
He put his hat on. He looked at her for a moment longer. You're not what I expected, he said. What did you expect? He almost smiled.
It was the first time she'd seen anything close to it on his face. Someone quieter, he said, and went out through the screen door. Clara turned back to the stove and put the pot back on the heat. Her hands were steady. Her heart was not particularly, but her hands were.
He came back from town 3 hours later with the $60 and a receipt. He came into the kitchen and set a folded piece of paper on the counter beside the stove without saying anything, and Clara unfolded it and looked at it. It was a signed acknowledgement from Harold Reese that the note was current. She folded it back up and put it under the salt tin. Tom Aldridge, Thomas said.
He was washing his hands at the sink. Runs the feed store. He said yes before I finished asking. Good man, Clara said. He said Thomas stopped.