"You don't have to stand in the hall," she said. A pause, then the sound of feet crossing the floor. She turned to find the girl, Emma, she would learn later, standing at the kitchen table with her hands at her sides, watching Clara with those careful, measuring eyes. "Did you really come for the job?" Emma asked.
"Or did papa send for you special?" "I answered an advertisement," Clara said. ""Your father's advertisement in the Kansas City paper."" Emma thought about this. ""He sent it to a lot of papers."" ""Did he?"" "He sent it to six," Jacob counted. Clara turned back to the pantry and began taking stock of what she had to work with. ""And how many people wrote back?"" "Three." Emma said. ""The others said no when he wrote back and told them about us."" Clara stopped what she was doing. She kept her back to the girl.
She needed a moment to arrange her face. "He told them about you." She asked carefully. "He told them there were four children and no wife." Emma said.
"They wrote back and said they'd changed their minds." Clara turned the jar of preserves over in her hands. It was plum. Good color still. "But he didn't tell me."
She said. "No." Emma said. There was no judgement in her voice. Just an 8-year-old stating a fact she'd already organized into the category of things that were simply true. ""Papa said you probably would have said no, too, if he'd told you.
So, he didn't."" Clara set the plum preserves on the counter. "He was probably right." She said. Emma was quiet for a moment. Then, ""Are you going to leave at the end of the week?"" "I said I'd assess whether the position was workable."
"That means you don't know yet." "That means I don't know yet." Clara agreed. Emma turned this over. She pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down in it with the particular deliberateness of a child who has decided to commit to being somewhere.
"I can help." Emma said. "In the kitchen. I know where everything is." Clara looked at her.
8-years-old. Dark hair coming loose from two braids that someone had attempted and then given up on somewhere between careful and good enough. A dress that was clean but slightly too short. The hem let down as far as it would go. "I'd appreciate that."
Clara said. Supper was beans and onion and cornbread and it was eaten at a table that seated six with one chair left empty at the head opposite Thomas Callahan. Nobody sat in it. Nobody mentioned it. Luke talked through most of the meal about a lizard he had found behind the barn and his theory that it was the same lizard he had found last summer, which Jacob disputed on the grounds that Luke couldn't tell one lizard from another.