Jacob got the highest mathematics mark in his school that spring. His teacher, a quiet woman named Mrs. Aldridge who Clare had met twice and found excellent sent a note home with him. Jacob brought the note to Clare before he brought it to Thomas which told her something she held on to carefully. Emily started sending her drawings to a woman in Denver who ran a small publication on Harriet Mercer's introduction. The woman wrote back with interest.
Emily read the letter so many times it started to wear at the creases and she did not discuss it for 3 days processing privately. And then she came to Clare and said she wants three more. Then send three more, Clare said. What if they're not as good, Emily? Clare said, "You've been managing this household since you were 12.
You can send three drawings to a woman in Denver." Emily straightened. That's not the same thing. Courage is courage, Clare said. Emily sent three more.
The woman in Denver wrote back again. Thomas found Emily's drawings accumulating on the parlor shelf, getting longer and more confident and more herself. And one evening, he stood in front of them for a long time. And then he said to Clare quietly, "Elanor would be proud of her. Elellanor would be proud of all of them," Clare said.
He took her hand. They stood there together in front of their daughter's drawings, and the house breathed around them, and upstairs somebody was running. Noah probably or Lily or possibly both of them engaged in some dispute that would resolve itself or escalate to requiring intervention. And Ben's voice was somewhere asking George an important question, and Jacob's pen was probably moving in the room he had claimed as his study. The small room off the kitchen that had been Clare's when she first arrived, because Jacob needed a room with good light for his work, and that room had the best morning light.
Clare had moved into Thomas's house. She had not thought about that, the simple daily fact of it, until she was standing there in front of Emily's drawings, Thomas's hand in hers, listening to her family inhabiting the rooms above her. She had walked in with a cloth bag. She had walked into every corner of this place. A year after Clare had stood at Morrison's general store reading that small yellowed advertisement, she was in the kitchen making bread when Ben came in from outside with his boots muddy and George the rabbit under his arm and sat down at the table and said, "Mama, can I ask you something?"
"Yes," she said without turning. "How did you find us?" He said. She turned then. She looked at her youngest child, this boy who had once sat in the dark by himself and had not spoken and had held a cloth rabbit like it was the only solid thing in the world.
And she thought about how to answer him. I found an advertisement, she said. In Morrison's store, it said there was work here. But how did you find us? Ben said again with the patience of a 5-year-old who understands that adults sometimes answer the wrong question.
Clare crossed the kitchen and sat down across from him and looked at him seriously the way he liked to be looked at when he asked serious things. I walked up a very long road, she said. And when I got here, the door opened before I could knock. Ben thought about this. That was me, he said.