After supper, the children were supposed to help clear the table. Lily carried two bowls. Noah carried the bread basket. Jacob started stacking plates with the efficiency of long practice. But somewhere in the middle of the clearing up, the little negotiations and arguments that live between children began to surface.
Lily said something sharp to Noah. Noah bumped Jacob's arm. Jacob said something back. Emily tried to moderate from the stove where she was already starting on the washing up and Ben slipped away. Clare noticed because she had been watching him.
She saw him slide off his chair without a sound and pad out of the kitchen in his socked feet and nobody else noticed because they were managing the controlled chaos of cleanup and Thomas had already stepped out to the porch with his coffee. Clare followed, not rushing, just following. She found him in the parlor in the darkest corner, sitting on the floor behind the horsehair sofa with his knees pulled up and his arms wrapped around them. Not crying, just sitting in the dark by himself, in the way a child sits when they have learned that being somewhere quiet and unseen is the safest place to be. Clare stood in the doorway for a moment.
Then she went in and sat down on the floor beside him, not across from him. Beside him, her back against the wall, her legs out in front of her in the same position as him, but without the knees up because she was too tall for that to be comfortable. They sat there together in the dark. After a long while, Ben turned his head and looked at her. She looked back.
"I'm not going to make you talk," she said quietly. "I just didn't want you to be by yourself. He looked at her for another long moment. Then he turned back to the dark, but he didn't move away. That was the moment Clare Bennett lost the argument she was having with herself about not becoming attached.
She didn't know it yet. She told herself walking back to her room that night that she had simply done the kind thing, the obvious thing. Any decent person would have done the same. It meant nothing about staying. It meant nothing about belonging.
She was here for a month, maybe 6 weeks, until she had saved enough to get herself to Denver and start over somewhere with better prospects. That was what she told herself. She lay in the narrow bed under the wool blanket and listened to the house settle around her, the creek of floorboards overhead, the sound of Thomas on the porch for a long time before finally coming inside the distant sound of the mountain wind against the windows, and she stared at the ceiling and told herself all the sensible things. She was asleep before she had finished telling them. The first week was about learning the rhythms of the house.
When Thomas left in the mornings, when Jacob rose early, always early. The way children become early risers. When they've taken on responsibilities that pull them out of bed. When Lily and Noah needed to be gotten up for school, which required a degree of physical negotiation that Emily had apparently been managing single-handedly for 2 years. When Ben woke, usually last, usually silent, usually needing to be found in whatever corner he had installed himself in before anyone noticed.
Clare learned that the stove required a particular technique, a specific sequence of damper and draft adjustment that Emily had figured out through trial and error, and would have been happy to not need to know. She learned that the wellwater came up cold even in October, and that heating enough of it for a proper wash required planning ahead. She learned that the barn cat, a disreputable orange animal who came and went as he pleased, was considered by all five children to be a member of the household and must be addressed accordingly. She learned on the third day that Jacob had not been going to school. She discovered this sideways.
She had gotten Lily and Noah up and fed and sent down the road toward the schoolhouse with their lunch pales. And when she came back inside, Jacob was already back at the kitchen table with the ledger. Don't you have school? She said before she thought about whether it was her place to say it. Jacob looked up.