A boy who had decided that the world was probably safe enough to be in fully. And there was Ben. Ben talked now the way rivers run constantly, inevitably with the pure confidence of something that has found its direction. He talked about George the rabbit and about stars and about what he was going to be when he grew up, which changed weekly. He talked at breakfast and through supper and sometimes appeared at Clare's bedside door in the early morning to tell her something he had remembered from a dream.
He called her Miss Clare still. He had been calling her that since the first week. One morning in January, standing in the kitchen while Clare made the breakfast bread, he said without any particular preamble. What do I call you after? Clare looked at him.
After what, she said, "After you and P get married," he said with the practical directness of a 4-year-old for whom this was a logistics question, not an emotional one. Clare set down the dough. She thought about it honestly, the way Ben's questions required honest thinking. "What do you want to call me?" She said.
Ben looked at George the rabbit who was sitting on the kitchen chair that had apparently become his chair. George says, "Mama," Bun said. "But George is a rabbit and he doesn't understand complicated things." Clare's chest did the enormous unbearable thing it did sometimes. She crouched down to Ben's level.
"What do you say?" She said. Bun looked at her with his direct clear gaze. "I say mama, too," he said. But only if that's okay because I had a mama and she went away and I don't want to I don't want to make her be gone more.
Clare reached out and took his face in both hands. Calling me mama doesn't make your first mama more gone, she said carefully. It just means you have room in your heart for more than one person who loves you and you have the biggest heart of anyone I know. Ben Walker, it fits. Bun considered this.
Okay, he said. He climbed back up into his chair next to George. "Mama," he said, trying it out, testing the sound of it in the kitchen air. "Hm," Clare said, and went back to the bread so he wouldn't see her face. "It sounds right," Ben reported to George.
Clare kept her hands in the dough and did not let herself fall apart, which took everything she had. February brought the twist nobody expected. It came in the form of a man named Gerald Pratt, one of the Pratt brothers, who held a note at Whitmore's bank, who appeared at the Walker Ranch on a Tuesday afternoon with his hat in his hands and a look on his face that was equal parts embarrassment and urgency. Thomas brought him inside. Clare stayed because Thomas had stopped suggesting she leave the room when things happened and she had stopped offering.
Gerald Pratt sat down and said without much preamble that Richard Whitmore had approached him last week with a proposition. Whitmore wanted to buy out Gerald's note pay it off early with favorable terms in exchange for Gerald signing a statement attesting to certain things about the Walker household. Thomas went very still. What things? He said Gerald turned his hat in his hands.