"We are." She paused. "We weren't for a while, but we are now." Mrs. Harlow wrote something in Pruitt's notebook and closed it.
She found Thomas and Clara on the porch when she came out. "The complaint," she said, "does not appear to be substantiated." She looked at Harold Reese, who had waited in his buggy with the expression of a man whose plan has not gone the way he expected. "I will be filing my assessment with the county. I do not anticipate further action."
She looked at Thomas. "Mr. Callahan, your children are fortunate." "I know that," Thomas said. Mrs.
Harlow looked at Clara. "Miss Bennett," she said, something in her expression had moved from assessment to something more considered. "Are you family?" A beat of silence. Clara opened her mouth.
"She runs the household," Thomas said. Then, a half second later, in a different voice, "She's essential to this family." He had not planned to say it. She could tell by the way he said it. It came out before whatever editor he employed for his words could stop it.
Mrs. Harlow looked between them. "I see," she said in the voice of a woman who sees considerably more than she is being told. She got back into her buggy. Pruitt climbed up beside her.
They drove down the road and away. Harold Reese sat in his buggy for a moment. Thomas walked to the edge of the porch. "Reese," he said. The banker looked at him.
"Don't come back to this property unless I've sent for you," Thomas said. It was not a threat. It was a fact stated in a voice that made facts feel permanent. Reese picked up his reins and left. The yard was quiet.
Clara stood on the porch and Thomas stood at the edge of it, and Jacob was somewhere behind them, and the summer afternoon pressed down on everything hot and still and alive. Thomas turned. He was looking at her with that expression again, the one she hadn't been able to categorize. She looked back at him and tried to put it somewhere she could understand it and couldn't quite. "Essential," she said.
"Quiet." He looked at her. "Is that not what you are?" She didn't have an answer for that. She went inside.