That's the whole of it. Nothing grander than that. He looked at her for a long moment across the gray afternoon light, and something passed over his face that hadn't been there in a long time. Not quite happiness, but something adjacent to it, something that might grow into it given enough warm suppers and enough clean laundry and enough time. "Well," he said finally, returning to the harness strap, though his voice had lost some of its old flatness.
"I'm glad you couldn't stand it." The gossip reached the preacher before it reached Ben. The way gossip in a small settlement generally traveled, carried by Mrs. Eunis Barrow, Norah's nearest neighbor on the other side, who had watched the arrangement unfold over the fall with an expression of gathering scandal she could no longer contain by December. A widow alone in a widowerower's house everyday sometimes passed dark, Mrs. Barrow told Reverend Holly's outside the church one Sunday loud enough that half the departing congregation heard it whether they wished to or not. It isn't decent Reverend somebody ought to say something before it goes further for the children's sake if nothing else.
Reverend Holly's who had called on Ben Toliver exactly twice in the six months since Mary's death and had left both times having accomplished nothing but a stilted prayer and an uneaten slice of pie, arrived at the toll of her farm the following Tuesday with the particular stiff righteousness of a man determined to make up for months of inaction with one decisive intervention. "Mr. told of her," he said, standing in the yard while Norah hung sheets on the line within clear earshot. "There is talk in the settlement about the propriety of this arrangement. A woman not your wife in your house daily, unshaperoned. I feel obliged to raise the concern for the sake of your standing and hers."
Norah set down her basket and walked over before Ben could find words. Her chin lifted, her voice even, though her heart had begun to pound. I'll come only in daylight hours going forward, reverend, if that eases the settlement's mind, she said, though something in her chest achd to say it. Some fear that daylight hours would mean less warmth, less time, less of everything these children had only just begun to have. I have no wish to make trouble for anyone, least of all these children, who have had trouble enough this year without their neighbors adding to it.
Ben looked at her sharply. Daylight isn't enough, he said, and he seemed almost as surprised by his own words as anyone else standing in that yard. Daylight isn't near enough, Reverend, and I'll not have Norah Quinn made to feel she's done something shameful by being the only person in this whole settlement who troubled herself to help my children when they were starving in plain sight of every one of you." His voice, so long unused to speaking with any force, cracked and then steadied. "I've just started living again these past two months.