Then she said in a voice stripped of its usual armor. Nobody talks back to Mrs. Hollis. Someone ought to, Clara said. Another half block of silence. She's the one who told Papa he should send us to live with our aunt in St.
Louis. Emma said after Mama died. She said he couldn't manage three girls on his own and that he needed to be realistic. Clara stopped walking. Emma stopped too.
He didn't send you. Clara said he told her. Emma's mouth curved brief and fierce and proud. He told her that his daughters would be raised on the land their mother loved and that anyone who thought otherwise could mind their own affairs. Clara looked at her.
He said it nicer, Emma added. But that was what he meant. "Good," Clara said, and Emma, for the first time, genuinely smiled at her. It lasted only a second. Then she straightened and walked ahead again.
But it was there. It had happened. Clara filed it away carefully in the place where she kept the things that mattered. The second Friday of November brought the first hard frost, and it brought Daniel Hayes to a place he had been avoiding for 2 years. Clara found him in this barn at dusk, not working, just standing in front of the old mayor's stall with his arms on the top rail and his head down.
She had come to bring him his supper because he hadn't come in at the hour she expected, and she could tell by the quality of the quiet coming from the barn that something was wrong. She set the plate on the workbench. "He didn't move." "Daniel," she said. It was the first time she'd used his given name, and she heard him register it a small shift in his shoulders.
The barest turn of his head. "Leave it," he said. "I'll be in." "All right," she said. "And didn't leave."
He turned then. Looked at her with the red-edged, dry-eyed look of a man who had decided some time ago that he was finished crying and was wrong. "She used to love this time of year," he said. The first frost. She'd bring the girls out to see the ice on the grass, and she'd say, "He stopped.
His jaw worked." She'd say, "The world was getting dressed up for winter. That's how she said it. Getting dressed up. Clara stayed where she was.
I can't go into the kitchen, he said without hearing her. I can't. He pushed off the rail, moved two steps away from it. It's been 2 years. Everybody says it gets easier.