I'm the oldest. She stepped back and held the door open. You can wait inside. Clare stepped in. The interior of the house hit her immediately, not with smell or disorder, but with weight.
The weight of a place where people were living as hard as they could, and the house was barely keeping pace with their living. The kitchen, which opened directly off the front hall, had a table with mismatched chairs around it. A wood stove with a pot of something simmering, a counter crowded with dishes that were clean but stacked without order. A pair of boy's boots sat in the middle of the floor for no apparent reason. A coat had fallen off its hook by the door, and nobody had gotten around to picking it up.
A 12-year-old boy sat at the kitchen table with a ledger open in front of him, running his finger down a column of numbers with his brow furrowed in a way that no 12-year-old should look at numbers. He glanced up at Clare, then backed down. "Jacob," Emily said to him. "This is Miss Bennett. She's here about the housekeeping."
Jacob looked up again. He looked at Clare with something more complicated than his sister's practical assessment. He looked at her like he was calculating a risk. "You done housekeeping before?" He asked.
"I have," Clare said. "Several years at the Clearwater boarding house." "That's the one on Maine," Jacob said. "It was Mrs. Hawthorne's place." "The same."
Jacob gave a short nod, apparently satisfied, and went back to his numbers. Clare watched him for this 12-year-old boy with a ledger and the eyes of a man who had been made responsible for things he didn't choose and something tightened in her chest. "Can I ask what you're working on?" She said. Jacob's pen stopped.
He looked up. "People apparently did not ask him that very often. Feed costs," he said. "Trying to figure if we can make it through to spring with what we've got or if P's going to have to go to Whitmore's bank again." He said the name Whitmore the way you say the name of a storm that's already taken something from you.
Clare filed that away. Jacob. Emily's voice was gentle but firm. Miss Bennett doesn't need to hear about all that. It's all right.
Clare said quickly and she smiled at Jacob. You're good with numbers. He shrugged in the way of a boy who knows he's good at something but has never been told so in a way that mattered. I reckon, he said. That's a useful thing to be good at, Clare said.
He looked at her for one more second. Then something in his face shifted. Not much, just a fraction. Just enough. He went back to his ledger, but the rigid set of his shoulders had loosened by a degree.