Mrs. Crane looked at the kitchen. She had expected something else, Vera understood. She had expected to find the evidence of her story, the disorder, the neglect, and instead there was a clean kitchen and a hot stove and coffee on the table and two children who were fed and present and not wild in any visible way. Aldrich asked Vera several questions, where she had come from, how long she had been at the mill, what her duties were.
He asked them in the even tone of a man doing a job, and she answered them the same way, plainly, without elaboration, and he wrote things in his book. Then Martin came in from the yard and climbed up on the chair next to Vera without asking and said, "Are these people staying for dinner?" Vera said, "I don't think so."
Martin looked at the county man and said, "She reads to me every night. She reads everything. She read me about the man who built the tower." Aldrich looked at the boy.
He said, "Is that right?" Martin said, "He built it anyway, even though the stars were too far. That's the right thing to do." Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Bess came in from the garden with dirt on her hands and looked at the room full of people and said, "The sweet peas are coming up along the south fence. There's three of them." She said it to Vera.
Vera looked at her. Three of them. Bess said, "I checked this morning. I didn't tell you yet." Mrs. Crane said something, but the room had shifted, and what she said did not land the way she had intended it to, and Aldrich closed his book.
He said, "I don't see anything here that requires further attention." He said it to Hobbs.
He did not say it to Mrs. Crane.
They left. Mrs. Crane left last, and she said something on her way out about the nature of propriety and the example being set, and Caleb held the door open for her and said nothing. And she went.
The yard was quiet. The mill was quiet. A jay called once from the pines on the ridge and then was quiet, too. Caleb turned from the door and looked at Vera. She looked back at him.
He said, "I have something to say to you." She said, "All right." He said, "I'd like to say it later, tonight, when the children are in bed."
She said, "All right." He nodded and went back to the mill. She stood in the kitchen for a moment with the coffee cup still on the table and the stove ticking in the quiet, and then she started on dinner because there was work to do and the feeling could wait.
She put the children to bed herself that night. She read Martin two fables, the one about the tower and a new one about a river that changed its course, and he fell asleep before the river reached the sea. And she tucked the blanket around him and left the lamp low and went to check on Bess, who was already in bed but not asleep and who looked up when Vera came to the door. Vera said, "Good night, Bess." Bess said, "Good night."
Then she said, "I'm glad the sweet peas came up." Vera said, "Me, too." Bess said, "My mother would have liked you." She said it simply, the way children say true things without armor.
And Vera stood in the doorway and looked at the girl in the lamplight and said, "That means a great deal to me." And she meant it entirely. And Bess turned over and closed her eyes. And Vera pulled the door to and stood in the hall for a moment in the dark.
Then she went to the kitchen. Caleb was already there. He was standing at the window, not looking out, just standing. And he had his coffee cup in his hands, but he had not poured anything into it. He turned when she came in.
She sat down at the table. He put the cup down and sat across from her, which was where he had sat the night he asked her about the tower. And the lamp was the same and the stove was the same and the house was quiet around them. He looked at the table for a moment.
Then he looked at her. He said, "I want to tell you what I've seen since you came." She waited.
He said, "I've seen a house that was cold and quiet become something else. I've seen my son learn to want to know things. I've seen my daughter plant seeds in a place she had given up on." He stopped.