She thought about Ben asleep upstairs with the cloth rabbit named George. She thought about Lily in the music box. She thought about Jacob at 6:00 in the morning with his handwriting on pages that shouldn't need his handwriting. She thought about Emily drawing again. She thought about Thomas's brief real smile.
She said, "It matters because you matter, all of you." Thomas looked at her. Something moved through his face that he did not allow to go very far. Controlled contained the discipline of a man who had learned to keep himself at a careful distance from things that could hurt him because he had been hurt and he had five children to raise and he could not afford to fall apart again. I'll talk to a lawyer in Milbrook, he said.
See if the terms of that note are as bad as they look. They're as bad as they look, Clare said. But a lawyer will tell you what can be done about it. He nodded. He picked up his coffee cup from the counter the same way he always did at the end of a hard conversation.
The cup as an anchor, something to hold. Thank you, he said just that. But it was said in a tone that held considerably more than the two words. He went upstairs. Clare sat down at the kitchen table and pressed both hands flat against the wood and breathed.
She was completely irrevocably involved in this family's life in a way that had nothing to do with the job description on that pinned advertisement and she knew it and she was not going back. She was not going back. The thing she had not anticipated was how much the town was watching. Cedar Hollow was small. Cedar Hollow was the kind of small where the news of a strange woman walking four miles up Milbrook Road to the Walker Ranch had been common knowledge within 48 hours of her arrival, where the fact of her continued presence was noted and discussed and interpreted in ways that had nothing to do with her actual function in that household.
She discovered this at Morrison's general store 6 weeks in when she went in for the weekly supply run. Two women she recognized from church. The Havford sisters, both in their 50s, both with the particular social authority of people who have lived somewhere their whole lives and consider the calibration of other people's behavior to be a civic responsibility, were at the counter when Clare came in. They stopped talking when she entered, which was itself information. Clare said good morning.
They returned it with the kind of warmth that was precisely calibrated to be polite without being welcoming. She collected her supplies. She was at the counter settling the account when Margaret Havford, the elder sister, said in a tone of studied casualness, "How are things up at the Walker place, Miss Bennett?" "Well, thank you," Clare said. Thomas managing all right, the other sister, Ruth, equally casual.
"He is," Clare said. "And the children a pause. Five children is quite a responsibility, quite a household to manage. They're good children, Clare said. She kept her voice even and warm because she was not going to give them a reaction.
Remarkable, actually. Margaret Haverford looked at her over the top of her supply list with the kind of knowing expression that was meant to be seen. It's a hard thing a man in that situation alone with so much responsibility. Another pause precisely waited. I do hope people are watching out, making sure everything is as it ought to be.
Clare looked at her. She understood exactly what was being said. The implication was as clear as if it had been stated outright that there was something improper about Clare's presence at the Walker Ranch, that a single woman living in a widowerower's house was a subject for town comment. That propriety was being questioned in ways that could be leveraged. Clare looked at Margaret Havford for exactly long enough that the woman's casual expression became slightly less casual.