"Truly." The woman extended her hand. "Eleanor Marsh. My husband's the doctor."
Clara shook it. "Doctor Marsh treated Cole during the fever. I'm grateful for his advice." Eleanor Marsh nodded with the satisfaction of someone who had arrived at an accurate opinion and found it confirmed.
"You come find me if you need anything. A woman new to town needs at least one person who will tell her the truth." "I'll remember that," Clara said. She could feel Eli beside her.
Not hovering. Not intervening. Just present. Clara understood that this was what she had asked for on the morning she'd given her answer.
Not someone to fight her battles. Someone to stand beside her so the town understood the ground she was standing on was solid. Briggs processed the order in near silence. The man by the door had found something very interesting in the notices.
The other woman at the dry goods shelf, who had not introduced herself and had watched the whole exchange with the particular expression of someone storing information for later use, eventually went back to her shopping. Jesse found a jar of hard candy and brought it to Eli with the practiced expression of a child who understood that Saturday was when the answer was more likely to be yes. Eli bought the candy. He gave each boy two pieces.
Then he gave the jar to Clara to put in the basket, which Jesse observed with the quiet satisfaction of a successful operation. Cole walked beside Clara on the way back to the wagon. He didn't hold her hand this time. He was six.
He was in public. He had his dignity. But he walked close enough that their arms were nearly touching, which was, from Cole, the same thing. The drive home was different from every other drive Clara had taken in her life in a way she found difficult to name.
She sat on the wagon bench with the winter sun on her face and the boys talking in the back. Ruth made occasional dry remarks about Eleanor Marsh's taste in hats. Eli drove with the easy confidence of a man on a road he'd traveled 10,000 times. The land around them was wide and white and quiet and enormous.
She was not safe in the way she'd spent three years trying to construct safety. Not the cautious, solitary safety of a woman who trusted no one far enough to be hurt by them. She was something else. She was planted.
She was in ground that had accepted her. She did not look at Eli. She looked at the road ahead of them, at the hills with their caps of snow, at the pale sky. He said quietly, so the boys wouldn't hear, "You did well in there."
"We did fine," she said. He accepted the correction without comment. They drove. The ranch came into view as the light was going gold in the midafternoon.
The familiar shape of it. The barn. The bunkhouse. The long wooden house with smoke from the chimney going straight up in the still air.