He looked at her. You don't have to keep doing it, she said. Not all of it. Not alone. His jaw was working.
He was fighting very hard and she could see exactly how hard. What if you leave? He said. It came out stripped down the way things come out when the fight has gone out of someone. What if you decide it's too much and you leave?
Clara held his gaze. I told you, she said. I don't say things I don't mean. You said that. He swallowed.
But the woman from Abilene probably said things, too. Clara let that sit for a moment. She did not rush it. You're right, she said. She probably did.
And I can't prove to you right now that I'm different from her. The only way I can prove that is by still being here 6 months from now and a year from now. She paused. So, here is what I'll tell you. I will be here tomorrow.
And the day after. And I will keep being here until I'm not. And if that day ever comes, which I am not planning for it to, I will tell you myself face-to-face before I go. You will not come home to an empty house. Jacob looked at her for a long time.
Then he picked up an armful of wood. Okay, he said. Rough and quiet and cracked at the edges again. He went inside. Clara sat on the wood pile for a moment in the good evening light on the back side of the barn and breathed carefully.
And then she got up and followed him. The twist came on a Sunday. She should have seen it coming. Later she would think about the signs and they were all there, visible as fence posts, but she had been looking at the wrong horizon. It was the Sunday of the biscuits.
She and Emma had put the lard in the icebox the night before and Emma had come downstairs with a level of focused seriousness that Clara found entirely appropriate for the occasion. And the biscuits had come out right layered and light. And Emma had held one in both hands and looked at it like it was evidence of something she'd needed to prove. And Clara was so caught up in watching Emma's face in that moment that she almost missed the sound of the buggy coming up the road. Two buggies actually.
She heard them and looked out the window. And what she saw made her set down her coffee cup very carefully. The first buggy held Harold Reese from the First Bank, which was not a surprise. The second buggy held a woman she had never seen, perhaps 60, dressed in the formal way of someone making an official call, sitting very straight with her hands folded in her lap. And beside the woman on the seat, holding a document case, was a man with a county seal on his jacket.