And every time the object disappeared, Clara said nothing about it. On the ninth day, June did not take the object from the edge of the table. She walked to where Clara stood at the washboard and held out a button. It was a small brass button, green with tarnish, the kind that came off a woman's Sunday coat. June held it in her open palm, and looked up at Clara with an expression that was not a smile, but was the closest thing to one that face had made in months.
Clara dried her hands on her apron. She took the button. She held it up to the window light and turned it slowly as if it were something worth examining. "That is a fine button," she said. June nodded once.
Then she left. From that day on, the button lived in the pocket of Clara's apron. She never sewed it onto anything. She carried it loose, and sometimes in the evenings when she sat by the stove mending clothes, June would come and stand beside her and put her hand in the apron pocket just to check that the button was still there. Clara would keep sewing.
June would keep standing. Neither of them needed to say what the button meant. Samuel came around more slowly. He was old enough to understand what Claraara was and what she was not. She was not his mother.
She was not family. She was hired and hired people leave. But he watched her patch his father's work coat with stitches so tight the patch was stronger than the original cloth. And he watched her scrub the ice off the water trough on a morning so cold her fingers split and bled. And he watched her eat her own supper last, always last, standing by the stove after everyone else had finished because there were only four chairs at the table, and no one had thought to bring a fifth.
He brought a fifth chair from the barn on the 19th day. He set it at the end of the table without a word. Clara sat in it that night. She did not thank him. She understood what it cost a boy like that to notice what the men had not.
November came down hard. The first snow fell before the month was a week old, and by the middle of it the drifts were waist high against the barn, and the wind came through the walls of the house in places where the chinking had dried and cracked. Clara stuffed rags into the gaps. She hung blankets over the windows that faced west. She kept the stove fed through the night, sleeping in short stretches between the hours of banking and stoking, and in the mornings the house was warm when the children woke, which was something that had not been true since Ruth died.
She fed the crew without complaint and without waste. Four hands plus Gus, five plates three times a day, plus the children, plus Eli. She stretched the stores with the discipline of someone who had known scarcity before this, and knew exactly how far a sack of flour and a side of pork could go when nothing was wasted. She made bone broth from scraps the hands would have thrown to the dogs. She rendered tallow for candles when the kerosene ran low.