Emily pointed Clare to a chair at the table's end. Coffee, she offered. Please, Clare said. Emily poured from a pot on the stove. The coffee was strong and slightly bitter, and Clare held the cup in both hands and let the warmth travel through her palms and thought, "This is a house full of people who have been holding things together with their bare hands for 2 years, and they are getting tired."
From somewhere upstairs came the sound of small feet running. Then a thump, then silence, then the feet again, and a child's voice saying something Clare couldn't make out. That's Lily and Noah," Emily said, sitting down across from Clare with her own cup. I told them to stay upstairs until I called them. They don't always listen.
She said this without any particular frustration, as though the not listening was simply a feature of the situation she had learned to accommodate. "How old?" Clare asked. Lily's nine, Noah's seven. Emily wrapped both hands around her cup.
And Ben's four. He's napping. The small boy. Clare had imagined standing in the doorway barefoot. Devastating eyes took shape in her mind more clearly now.
Five children, Clare said. Yes, ma'am. And your father manages the ranch as well. Emily's jaw tightened slightly. He does what he can.
There was something in those four words that carried a whole novel inside them. Clare let them sit. She did not push. They drank their coffee in a quiet that was not uncomfortable, and Clare looked around the kitchen with the eyes of someone already calculating, not with the coldness of efficiency, but with the warmth of someone who sees a problem and instinctively wants to solve it. The shelves needed reorganizing.
The stove pipe needed checking. The window latch was broken and had been propped with a stick of wood. A basket of mending sat in the corner, and the pile in it was deep enough that it had probably been sitting there a month. She was still looking when she heard boots on the porch. The front door opened.
Thomas Walker came in the way. Men come in who have been outdoors since before sunrise, carrying the cold with him. Shoulders set, moving with purpose, because purpose was the thing that kept him going. He was perhaps 35, maybe 36. Dark hair that needed cutting.
A jaw that needed shaving. Hands that were roughened in a way that spoke of daily hard work done without complaint. He was not a handsome man in any conventional sense. He was a present man, the kind of man who fills a room not with charm but with the simple quiet fact of himself. He stopped when he saw Clare.
His eyes went from her to Emily. Emily gave a small nod toward the advertisement Clare had placed on the table. He looked at Clare again. Thomas Walker, he said. He did not offer his hand.