"I know it," he said. "You haven't failed them," Clare said. "I want to be clear about that. You've been holding this family together while grieving someone you loved. That's one of the hardest things a person can do.
But you can't hold them together and be with them at the same time if you're trying to do it all alone." He looked at her for a long time. The kitchen was quiet around them, the stove ticking as it cooled, the mountain wind against the windows. Why did you stay? He said finally.
You said one month. Clare looked at him. She picked up her pen. The bread rises better up here, she said. Something to do with the altitude.
Thomas Walker looked at her for another long moment. And then, quiet unexpected the first time she had seen it, he smiled. It was a small smile, brief, but real. He went upstairs. Clare sat at the kitchen table with the household accounts and the pen in her hand and told herself very firmly that she had not noticed how different that smile made his whole face look.
She had absolutely noticed. She put the accounts away and went to bed. Outside the window the mountains were very dark and very still, and above them the sky was full of stars, and the walker ranch sat quiet under all of it. And inside it, five children slept. And a man sat at the edge of his bed in the dark for a long time before lying down.
And a woman in a small room off the kitchen stared at the ceiling and listen to the house around her and thought about how strange it was that a place could start feeling like yours before you'd even decided to let it. She had come here for a job. She had come here with a cloth bag and $11 and a pride she'd swallowed and a plan that had nothing to do with this. But the house had its own ideas and so it was becoming clear did the family inside it. The month ended on a Sunday.
Clare knew it because she had been counting not obsessively, not with dread exactly, but with the quiet awareness of a woman who had made herself a promise and intended to keep it. 30 days. She had told herself 30 days. She would work her month, save what she could, and then reassess from a position of slightly less desperation than the one she'd arrived in. She was standing at the kitchen basin washing the breakfast dishes when she realized she had stopped counting somewhere around day 19.
She stood there with her hands in the water and thought about that for a moment. Then she kept washing. Thomas came in from the barn and poured himself coffee and stood at the counter and said, "The north fence line's going to need full replacement before winter. I figure two weeks of work, maybe three." "How much will that cost?"
Clare asked. "More than I've got right now." He said it the same way Jacob talked about feed costs. Like a fact, not a complaint. A Walker family trade, apparently.
The refusal to perform suffering. I'm going to have to go into Whitmore's bank next week. Clare dried her hands on the dish towel. She turned around. Is that the only option?