She sat there on the kitchen floor until the worst of the afternoon tiredness passed, and then she got up and put Caleb on her hip and started dinner. Nathan came back from the pasture at dusk. He came into the kitchen, smelling of horses and cold air, and set his hat on the hook, and something about the quiet of the house, dinner on the stove, Caleb in his chair, gnawing on a piece of dried apple, the fire doing what a fire was supposed to do, made him stop for a moment in the doorway and just stand there. She was stirring something on the stove and she felt him stop, felt the quality of the pause and she said without turning around the far fence.
How bad is it? Third post is rotting, he said. I'll need Calhoun and Dolan out there Monday. I'll tell them at breakfast.
He moved into the room and sat down at the table. And Caleb turned and made a reaching motion toward him, and Nathan lifted his son out of the chair and settled him against his chest with the ease of habit. "You had a long day," he said. She glanced back at him.
"What makes you say that?" "You've got flour on your ear." She put her hand up automatically, and he was right. There was flour there, and she had no idea how long it had been there.
And she felt a flush of something that was probably tiredness and probably also mild embarrassment. But that she covered over with. Caleb's been helping with the bread again. I thought you were going to keep him out of the flour.
I was. He has opinions about that plan. Nathan looked down at his son and back up at her, and there it was again. That brief easiness, like a window opened for just a moment before someone remembered to close it.
She turned back to the stove. She thought, "This house is getting harder to leave, and I haven't even tried yet." She thought, "That should probably concern me more than it does." The answer it gave her back was quiet and completely unhelpful, the way true things were sometimes quiet.
She stirred the pot in the kitchen filled with the smell of something cooking. And outside the Wyoming dark came down over everything and held the house in the particular way that dark did out here, total and enormous. And somehow with the fire going and the lamp lit and a baby making small sounds and a man sitting at a table less frightening than it used to seem, the Hardgrow family arrived on a Wednesday, which Evelyn would later think was fitting because Wednesdays had always seemed to her the kind of day that didn't belong fully to either half of the week. Uncertain, neither beginning nor end, the kind of day things happened on that you hadn't prepared for.
There were two of them, a man and a woman, arriving in a buggy that was nicer than anything Grace Falls usually saw on its main street. The kind of vehicle that announced itself before the people in it had to say a word. She saw them from the kitchen window, saw them pull up to the front of the house, and climb down with the particular deliberate movements of people who had decided in advance how this visit was going to go. She'd never seen them before, but she knew who they were before Nathan told her.
The same way you sometimes knew the weather before you looked at the sky. Nathan met them at the door. She stayed in the kitchen with Caleb on her hip and listened to the voices in the front room without being able to make out the words, just the shape of them. The man's voice flat and carrying the woman's higher and with something clipped in it, and Nathan's underneath both, careful in a way she'd learned meant he was working to stay that way.
After a few minutes, he came to the kitchen doorway. Evelyn, he said, would you take Caleb for a bit? She looked at his face. He wasn't asking her to leave.