Your father told me. "Sit down. Breakfast will be ready shortly." He didn't sit down. He came into the kitchen and went to the back door and looked out through the window glass in the upper half of it, checking something she couldn't see.
"Papa already did the chickens," he said. "I do the chickens." "Then tomorrow you'll do them," Clara said. "Your father did them this morning. That's all."
Jacob turned from the door. His expression was one she recognized from a different angle. The expression of a child who has taken on responsibilities that are too large for him and has structured his entire sense of usefulness around those responsibilities and does not know what he is without them. She had worn that expression herself for about 18 months after her father left. She knew exactly what it felt like from the inside.
"I'm not here to take your jobs," she said, keeping her voice even. "I'm here to do mine." He looked at her for a long moment. Then he sat down at the table. It was not acceptance.
She knew that. It was a boy choosing a different strategy and she respected it as such. Luke arrived 4 minutes later at a volume disproportionate to his size announcing that he had seen the lizard again and that it was definitely the same lizard and Jacob said that was impossible and by the time Emma came downstairs the argument had progressed to a level of technical detail about lizard identification that Clara found genuinely impressive in its specificity. Noah came last. He appeared at the bottom of the stairs in a cotton shirt that was inside out and stood there with his dark eyes moving around the kitchen until they landed on Clara.
Then he walked directly to the chair beside hers and climbed into it without a word. Clara set a plate in front of him. He looked at it. Then he looked up at her. "You're still here."
He said. The table went quiet in the particular way that children go quiet when something has been said that lands in an unexpected register. Clara looked at the boy, 4 years old, inside out shirt and solemn eyes and a question that was not a question. "I'm still here." She said.
Noah looked back at his plate and picked up his fork. Thomas Callahan across the table was looking at his coffee. Clara went back to the stove. She drove herself into Red Valley with a list and a budget that Thomas had provided without comment and a very clear sense of what she was and was not doing with her day. She was not making a home.
She was stocking a pantry she had agreed to manage through the end of the week. The mercantile was run by a woman named Hattie Greer who was somewhere north of 60 and had the energy of someone half that and the opinions of someone who had been waiting 40 years for someone to ask. She took Clara's list and filled it with the efficiency of long practice, and talked the entire time about Red Valley and its inhabitants and the weather and the price of flour. And Clara listened with half her attention and spent the other half being grateful that Hattie Greer did not appear to require conversational reciprocity. It was when Hattie set a paper-wrapped package of sugar on the counter that she paused.
You're out at the Callahan place, she said. It wasn't a question. I am, Clara said. Hattie looked at her over the counter. Her expression had shifted from cheerful commerce to something more careful.