She looked at Caleb again. He really does look well. He's eating everything he can find that isn't nailed down, Evelyn said. I consider that healthy.
Clara laughed. And it was a real laugh. And after that, the conversation was easier. The way conversations got easier once the difficult thing inside them had been brought out and acknowledged and set aside.
After Clara left, Evelyn stood at the kitchen window and looked at the yard in its April state. Mud still mostly with the beginning of green at the edges of things. The bare trees she looked out at every morning starting to show the first buds, pale and tentative against the cold sky. She thought about what Clara had said.
People come around. It just takes time. She'd been told that before and she'd always met it with skepticism because in her experience, people came around only when coming around cost them less than staying where they were. What had changed in Grace Falls was not some shift in fundamental character.
It was that the Hargrove petition had failed and she and Nathan were married and Caleb was clearly thriving and the situation had resolved in a way that made the earlier judgment look wrong to the people who'd held it. That was not the same as generosity. That was just people updating their information. But she thought, "Maybe that's enough.
Maybe you don't need people to be generous. Maybe you just need them to update their information eventually, and you need to be standing there with the truth when they do." She'd been standing with the truth since September. She was still standing with it.
And here was April and Clara Fen at the kitchen table with a covered dish, and Mrs. Aldridge apparently telling people that Evelyn had been treated poorly, which was a form of vindication that was quiet and imperfect and absolutely real. Nathan came in from the south pasture that evening with a long scratch on his forearm from a fence repair that had gone sideways, not deep, but bleeding enough to need attention, which he'd wrapped in his own handkerchief in a way that was workable, but not particularly effective. She unwrapped it at the kitchen table and cleaned it and bound it properly while he sat still with the patience of a man who'd learned that objecting to being taken care of was more trouble than it was worth. Clara Fen came today, she said.
I know. I saw the buggy when I came in. He watched her work. How was it?
Useful. She tied off the bandage. She was making an indirect apology without quite calling it that. I accepted it in the same spirit.
How are you with it? She looked at the bandage on his arm and then at him. I'm fine with it. I'm not going to pretend the November wasn't what it was, but Clare is not my enemy and never was.