Yes, sir. Good. Thomas let go. He picked up his hat from the hook by the door. I'm going to Red Valley.
He looked at Clara. She looked at him. Tom Aldridge, she said. He'll know who the best attorney in the county is. That's where I'm going, he said.
I know. He held her gaze for one moment. There was the question in it, not a spoken one, just the shape of it. The particular way a person looks at another person when they need to know they're not standing alone. She answered it the only way she knew how.
She uncrossed her arms and stood straight. We'll be here when you get back, she said. He put his hat on and walked out. She held the house together for the 5 hours he was gone with the same practical competence she had used for everything else, which meant she made lunch, and she answered Luke's questions about why Papa had gone to town on a Monday, and she helped Emma with her reading, and she sat on the floor of the main room with Noah and built a structure out of wooden blocks that Noah then demolished with a satisfied thoroughness of a 4-year-old exercising editorial control. And in the spaces between all of it, she thought.
She thought about Edward and Ruth Harlow who had come for Christmas 2 years ago and made a child feel too loud. She thought about Catherine Harlow sitting very straight in a buggy and watching everything with the eyes of a woman conducting an assessment she had already decided the conclusion of. She thought about a petition filed in a county court and the word relocated and the look on Jacob's face when he heard it. She thought about Thomas saying, I'm not going to lose you either, and the absolute steadiness with which he'd said it. And she thought about what she was, not what she felt, not what had been growing in her chest for 4 weeks with the slow insistence of something that intends to take up space.
But what she was legally, functionally, on paper in the world, she was a housekeeper. She was a woman who had answered an advertisement and stayed. She had no legal standing in that courthouse. No formal connection to these children or this man. If Arthur Vance put her on a witness stand and asked her to define her relationship to the Callahan household, she would say housekeeper, and it would be both true and catastrophically insufficient, and she knew it.
She was thinking about this when Jacob came and sat beside her at the kitchen table that evening. The little ones were in the main room. He'd come deliberately, she could tell. He sat with his hands on the table in the posture that was his father's posture, and he looked at her. "I've been thinking," he said.
"I know," she said. "You've been thinking, too." "Yes." He looked at his hands. "In court," he said, "they're going to ask who you are."
"Yes." "And you're going to say housekeeper." "That's what I am." Jacob was quiet for a moment. "It's not all you are," he said.
She looked at him. 10 years old, arms not crossed for once, hands flat on the table like he was making a decision and anchoring it. "I know that," she said quietly. "Does Papa know that you know that?" She thought about a man's hand in hers at a kitchen table 3 days ago.