And by the third week, Pruitt told her the biscuits were the best he'd had in 3 years, which was a long speech for Pruitt, and she thanked him simply and went back inside. Caleb watched the noon meals from a slight distance, the way he watched most things. He ate with his hands and said little and let the men talk. And once, when Doyle said something that edged toward the impertinent, Caleb looked at him once, just once, and Doyle went quiet and finished his food.
She noticed. She said nothing about it. He noticed that she noticed and said nothing about that either.
This was the nature of the thing between them in those early weeks, a careful mutual attention that neither of them named. Coffee left on the counter at a particular hour, the porch step, which she had not mentioned and he had not mentioned, appeared one morning repaired and solid, the nail set and the board planed flush. She stepped on it going out to the garden and felt the difference and kept walking. Nothing said about the step.
She said nothing about it either. He began to linger a few minutes longer at the kitchen door in the evenings. Not long, 3 minutes, perhaps five. He would pour his coffee and stand at the window and sometimes they would talk about the mill or the children or what needed doing. And sometimes they would not talk at all and the silence was the comfortable kind, which is rarer than it sounds.
She read to Martin every evening now. It had become the fixed point of the boy's day, the thing he organized his afternoons around. And he would appear at the kitchen table after supper with a book or sometimes just with a question, something he had been saving up. And she would answer it or read to him or both.
And he would fall asleep there more often than not and Caleb would come and carry him to bed. One evening Caleb came in early and Martin was already asleep and Vera was still at the table with the book open, reading ahead to see what came next. And Caleb sat down across from her, which he had not done before. And he said, "What is it tonight?"
She said, "It's the one about the man who builds a tower to reach the stars and finds out the stars are farther than he thought." He said, "How does it end?" She said, "He builds the tower anyway." Caleb was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, "That seems right." She looked up from the book. He was looking at the table, at his hands, and there was something in the set of his face that was not quite what it usually was, something less defended. And she looked at it for only a moment before she looked back at the page. Some things change the moment you look at them straight.
The trouble came back on a Friday, the way trouble often does, when the week has loosened its grip and people have let their guard down. Mrs. Crane was not the kind of woman who let things settle. She was the kind of woman who required a story to have a shape she recognized, and the shape she had chosen for Vera Marsh was the shape of a cautionary tale. And when the cautionary part failed to materialize, she felt it as a personal affront.
She had been telling people in town that the Rourke mill was no place for a woman with no people and no references, that the children were being left to run wild, that the house was in a state, that Caleb Rourke was a man who did not know what he was inviting in. Word travels in a small town the way weather does, low and fast and ahead of itself. It came back to Vera through Pruitt, who told her without quite telling her, who said only that there was talk in town and that she should know it. And she thanked him and went back to the kitchen and stood at the window for a moment and looked at the garden in the fence where the sweet peas were not yet showing.
Then she started supper, but it was worse than talk. Mrs. Crane had gone to the county clerk, a man named Hobbs who owed her husband a favor, and she had raised a question in the formal way about the suitability of the arrangement at the Rourke property, specifically as it concerned the welfare of the children. She had framed it as concern. She had prepared it at home.
Caleb found out on a Saturday when Hobbs rode out to the mill, not officially, he said, just to have a conversation, which was the way of such things. And Vera was in the kitchen and could hear the voices on the porch but not the words, and she did not go to the window. When Hobbs left, Caleb came inside and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. She turned from the stove.
He said, "It's Crane's wife. She's made a complaint about the situation here." She said, "I know there's been talk."
He said, "It's more than talk now. Hobbs has to look into it. He'll come back in a week with someone from the county." She said, "What would you like me to do?" He looked at her.
He said, "What do you mean?" She said, "If it would be easier for you, if it would settle the matter, I can find other work. I don't want to cause trouble for the children." He was quiet for long enough that she thought he was going to agree with her, and she kept her face where it needed to be and waited. Then he said, "That's not what I want."
He said it plainly, the way he said most things, and he looked at her directly when he said it, and then he put his hat back on and went out to the mill. She turned back to the stove.
Something moved through her that she set aside because supper needed finishing, and Martin would be in soon, and Bess was in the garden, and there was work to do, and she had learned a long time ago that the feeling could wait if the work could not.
The county man came the following Wednesday, and he brought Hobbs, and Mrs. Crane came with them, which was not official, but which Hobbs had not prevented. And they arrived in the morning when the children were both in the yard. Vera was in the kitchen. She heard the wagon, and she dried her hands, and she went to the door.
Mrs. Crane was already talking before she was off the wagon, talking about the nature of the arrangement and the questions it raised and the welfare of the children. And the county man, whose name was Aldrich, was writing things in a small book and looking at the house and the yard with the practiced neutrality of a man who has seen many such situations and has learned not to decide too quickly. Caleb came from the mill. He walked to the yard and stood with his hands at his sides and said, "Come inside." And they came inside, and Vera put coffee on the table and stood near the stove.