It's all right. I know what all right is, Eddie said. You don't need to tell me when it is. Calder let a moment pass. Nobody taught you.
They started to. Eddie's jaw tightened slightly. Then we moved. All right. Calder kept his voice even.
We'll figure it out. I'm 10. Eddie said. Most kids my age already. Most kids your age didn't move four times in 3 years.
Calder looked at him directly. We'll figure it out. Eddie finally looked at him. His expression was still carefully controlled. But underneath the control there was something raw and a little angry and a little afraid, which was honest.
And Calder decided that honest was a better thing to see than the smooth compliance Eddie usually offered the world. I'm not stupid, Eddie said. I know you're not. You trained December to let you touch her shoulder yesterday after she shied away from me for 2 months. That's not a stupid person's work.
Eddie blinked. It was almost imperceptible that blink, but it was there. Clara can help you with the reading, Calder said. Or one of the twins. They're good at it.
But it's up to you. Eddie said nothing for a moment. Maybe Clara, he said finally. Talk to her. Eddie walked away and called her watched him go, and then he went back to what he'd been doing because making a performance of the moment seemed like exactly the wrong thing to do.
That afternoon, he saw Clara and Eddie sitting at the kitchen table with one of the books from the shelf between them. Clara's finger moving under a line of text, and Eddie's forehead furrowed in intense, almost combative concentration. Clare was not making it easy or soft. She was pointing at a word and waiting and waiting and then giving it only when Eddie's expression shifted toward something that was about to tip into humiliation. She had the instinct for it.
She knew exactly where the line was. Calder kept walking. On the fifth day, Margaret Vale arrived. Calder had heard of Margaret Vale the way you hear of anyone in a small territory, secondhand in pieces. She was the widow of a man who had left her well enough provided for that she'd had time to develop opinions, and her opinions about the proper ordering of charity and community in Red Hollow had been the organizing principle of the town's social welfare apparatus for nearly a decade.