It is in you. It did not leave when she did and a heart that has learned to love the way yours has can go on and love other people, too, as many as it likes and that is not being untrue to your mama. That is the very thing she would want most. Grace thought about this with her whole small serious face. And then she put her arms around Adeline's neck and held on.
And Adeline held her, and over the child's shoulder her eyes were bright, because there is no one who understands a motherless child quite so well as a woman who has known what it is to be alone in the world with no one to hold on to. Samuel took longer. A boy of nine who has appointed himself the man of the house does not lay that burden down easily, because he has confused the burden with his own worth. But Adeline was clever with him. She did not try to take his chores away, which would have insulted him.
She worked alongside him instead, and she asked his opinion on things gravely as one working person to another, and she let him teach her where the good kindling was kept and how his father liked the stock fed, and slowly, over those three days, the boy's shoulders came down from around his ears. Because a child who has been carrying a grown man's load will let it down at last if someone stronger stands beside him and quietly takes an end of it. And little Ruth, the three-year-old, the silent one, the one whose quiet Caleb could not bear. On the second evening, drying dishes, Adeline began to sing. It was nothing grand, only an old and simple tune, the kind a woman sings without thinking while her hands are busy.
And little Ruth, sitting on the floor with her wooden spoon, went very still. And then, so quietly that at first no one was sure of it, the child began to hum along. Just the tune, just under her breath. But it was sound, and it was music, and it was the first music that had come out of that child since the fever. And Caleb Heart, standing in the doorway of his own kitchen, watching a stranger coax a song back out of his silent baby daughter, had to turn and go out into the cold yard for a moment and stand in the dark because a man does not always want to be seen at the exact moment his heart cracks open.
But there was the matter of the food. Caleb had said nothing to Adeline about how thin the stores truly were. Because a man does not tell a woman he has just taken in that there may not be enough to feed her, and he had been quietly going without himself, taking the smaller portion, the way he had taught himself to do, hoping to stretch the beans and the salt pork through to the spring stock money. But Adeline Rou had kept house her whole life, and there is no hiding the true state of a pantry from a woman who has kept house. She saw it.
She saw the near-empty flour bin and the last of the salt pork and the soft potatoes, and she did the same arithmetic Caleb did every night, and she said nothing about it, either, because the two of them were engaged, without ever discussing it, in the same silent conspiracy of the poor, which is to keep the children from knowing how close the wolf has come to the door. And she understood, doing that arithmetic, that there would be no Christmas dinner. Not a real one. There was not the food in the house for it. There would be beans, as there had been beans, and that would be the whole of the children's Christmas, and their mother not two months in the ground.