He simply watched silent while she built up the fire and set the tub in the middle of the kitchen floor and began without ceremony to strip the grime from his children one by one. Sam went first, stiff and embarrassed at 10 years old to be bathed like an infant, but he did not fight her, and something in his shoulders eased as the warm water and soap worked through weeks of dirt. Ruth cried a little quiet tears that had nothing to do with the washing and everything to do with being touched gently by someone after so long without it, and Norah hummed to her without breaking the rhythm of her scrubbing, the way she might have hummed to a child of her own, if she'd ever had one. Ned, last and smallest, sat in the tub, and stared up at her with enormous, solemn eyes, and asked her in a small, grave voice whether she was going to stay, a question she had no honest answer for yet. There, Norah said finally, wrapping Ned in a towel and setting him on his feet, pink and clean and blinking like he'd forgotten what it felt like.
She straightened, wiped her hands on her apron, and turned to look at Ben Toliver for the first time since she'd walked through his door. He hadn't moved an inch. "You're next," she said. Ben Toliver did not argue and he did not move and Norah Quinn had not truly expected him to. Not that first day.
So she simply left the water for him to use or not use as he chose gathered her things and told the children she'd see them tomorrow and walked home in the dusk with her arms aching and her heart for the first time in four months feeling like it was doing something useful instead of merely watching. She came the next day and the day after that, and within a week it had become simply understood, the way certain arrangements become understood without ever being formally agreed to by anyone. Norah arrived with the son before Ben left for the fields, and she scrubbed the kitchen floor and beat the rugs and hauled water and cooked porridge thick enough to stick to a child's ribs. And she sent Sam and Ruth off to the schoolhouse with clean faces and packed lunches. Standing at the gate to watch them go the way.
She suspected no one had stood to watch them go in a very long time. She mendedied the tears in Sam's only decent shirt and combed the snarls from Ruth's hair until the girl stopped flinching at the touch of a brush, and she kept Ned close at her skirts through the mornings, teaching him his letters in the dirt with a stick, because there was no slate in the house, and she saw no reason a boy his age shouldn't already know them. Ben said nothing about any of it. He did not thank her, not in those first weeks, and he did not stop her either, which Norah understood in its own quiet way to be its own kind of permission. He watched her from the edges of rooms sometimes, the way a man watches whether he isn't sure will pass or worsen.
And once coming in from the barn, he found her scrubbing at a stain on his dead wife's good tablecloth, and went so pale and still that Norah set the cloth down at once, and did not touch it again, understanding without being told which griefs were hers to handle, and which belonged to him alone. "I washed the boy's shirts," she told him one evening, folding linens at his table, while he sat, as always, saying nothing. "Ruth needs new shoes before winter. Her toes are near through the old ones. I can take her into town Saturday if you'll spare the wagon.