Then he said good night quiet and plain and walked back down the dark hallway to wherever he went when he left them all. Clara stood in the room that had been the guest room and looked out at the dark pasture and listened to the sounds of a ranch settling into evening, the horses, the wind, the distant creak of the barn. She had said she would stay through the end of the week. She was already afraid that the week was not going to be enough time. Not because the work was too hard, but because four children had already started to take up space in her chest and she had been here less than a day and the smallest one had held her wrist at supper like she was something solid in a world that had been losing its solid things.
She sat on the edge of the bed in her good dress and her dusty boots and pressed her hands together in her lap. She was here for a job. She was going to remember that. She was absolutely going to remember that. She told herself it was just one more day.
That was what Clara Bennett did on the second morning in that house. She stood at the kitchen stove before anyone else was awake and told herself she was staying one more day and that one more day was not a decision. It was simply a delay of a decision which was an entirely different thing. She had the fire going and the coffee on before the sun had cleared the flat line of the horizon. Her hands moved through the kitchen with the muscle memory of a woman who had cooked in difficult circumstances before her mother's illness had seen to that.
And she took inventory as she worked the way she always took inventory, making a list in her head of what the pantry needed and what could wait and what absolutely could not. The beans from the night before had been enough, but enough was not a strategy. She heard him before she saw him. Thomas Callahan came down the stairs at a quarter past five, moving quietly the way tall men sometimes learn to move in houses with sleeping children. He stopped in the kitchen doorway when he saw her.
She did not look up from the stove. "Coffee's ready," she said. A pause, then the sound of a chair being pulled back from the table. "You didn't have to start this early," he said. "The work doesn't care what time I started," Clara said.
"It just cares whether it gets done." She heard him wrap his hands around the mug she'd set out. A long silence settled between them that was not entirely hostile and not entirely comfortable and that she was beginning to recognize as simply the shape of the man's quiet. "I'm going to need to go into Red Valley today," she said. "The pantry needs restocking.
I can make a list. I'll take you in after the morning chores." "I can drive myself if you leave me the wagon." Another pause. "Can you handle a team?"
"I grew up on a farm in Missouri," she said flatly. "I can handle a team." She heard something the silence that might have been a small recalibration. All right, he said. I'll hitch it before I go out.
Thank you. She poured her own coffee and stood at the counter with it, and they were quiet together in the early morning kitchen, and it was not comfortable exactly, but it was functional, and functional was what she had come here to be. Then Jacob came downstairs. He appeared in the doorway in the same posture she'd seen the night before, arms not quite crossed but close to it, jaw set, eyes moving over the kitchen the way a boy moves his eyes over something he's decided to distrust. He was 10 years old, and he looked 40 in the places that counted.
"You made coffee," he said. He said it the way a person states evidence at a trial. "Good morning, Jacob," Clara said. He looked at her. "You know my name."