He looked immediately like he wasn't sure what to do with the fact that he'd done it. And she looked back down at the bread she was cutting and didn't comment, because the wrong comment at the wrong moment can close a door that had just begun to open. Caleb, for his part, looked up at his father with the confused delight of someone who had just caused something good without fully understanding how, and then resumed his determined cross-kitchen navigation. "He's going to be trouble," Nathan said when his voice was back to regular.
"He already is," she said. "He got into the flour this morning." "How?" "I'm still not entirely sure.
He's creative." Nathan looked at his son with an expression she'd seen on his face a handful of times. Helpless and fond and something underneath both of those things that was harder to name. Something that had to do with Margaret and the fact that Margaret would never see this and he was seeing it alone.
Except he wasn't quite seeing it alone. She thought about saying that. She decided not to. Nathan stood and carried his cup to the wash basin and set it there and put his hat on and said as he was going through the door, "Thank you for breakfast, Evelyn."
He'd started using her first name somewhere in the third week, so gradually she hadn't noticed exactly when it had begun. She said, "You're welcome, Nathan." And meant both words separately, which was how she meant most things. The afternoon that tested her most that month was not dramatic in the way she might have expected.
There was no crisis with the livestock, no confrontation with Briggs, no emergency that required her to be competent in a visible and impressive way. It was a Saturday and the men were occupied with their own things and Nathan had ridden out to the far pasture to check on fencing and it was just her and Caleb in the house which was usually fine. It wasn't fine that afternoon. She'd gotten barely any sleep the night before because Caleb had been fussing from teething and she'd gotten up with him twice and by mid-afternoon she was running on tiredness and yesterday's coffee and the accumulated weight of 5 weeks of being the person who held things together.
And Caleb was having one of his genuinely difficult days where nothing was right and everything was worth crying about. And she sat on the floor of the kitchen with him in her lap and her back against the cabinet. And she thought with a clarity that the exhaustion made somehow sharp, "What am I doing here?" Not in despair, just in the plain uninflected way of a question.
What was she doing here in this house, in this kitchen, in a life that was not hers, caring for a child she had no formal claim on? In a state she'd arrived in not quite knowing what she was looking for. Caleb put his hands on her face. He did this sometimes, grabbed her face with both hands the way babies do, tactile, direct, with no concept of personal space.
His hands were small and warm and slightly damp as baby hands usually were, and he looked at her with the direct, unself-conscious scrutiny of someone who had not yet learned to look at anything obliquely. She put her hand over one of his. She thought this this is what I'm doing here. It wasn't an answer that would satisfy anyone who asked for a logical explanation.
It was just a fact. The way some things were just facts. You stayed because you couldn't leave. Not for any reason you could diagram or defend.
Just because the leaving was unthinkable and the staying was the only thing that made sense. Caleb made a small sound that was not quite a word. I know, she said. Me too.