She waited. "Harlen Jr.," he said. "Margaret Caldwell's nephew. He was at the feed store with two of his friends. He pulled slightly away from the cloth.
They said things about His eyes came up to hers. About you. Clara's hands went still. "What things?" She said you were only here for Papa's money.
Said you were. He stopped. His jaw worked. Said you were the kind of woman who travels town to town looking for men to take from. Said everyone in town knew it.
He looked at the table. I told him he was a liar. Is that when he hit you? That's when I hit him, Noah said. He hit me after.
Clara looked at him. Looked at the blood on his collar, the set of his shoulders, the anger in his eyes that was covering something far more tender underneath. Noah, she said carefully. You didn't need to defend me. "Yes, "I did."
He said flat, certain. The certainty of a child who has decided something and arrived at it through his own reasoning, not because someone told him to. "Why," she said. He was quiet for a moment. His fingers moved on the table edge.
"Because you stayed," he said. "You could have left a dozen times by now. Papa wasn't kind to you at the start. I wasn't kind to you at the start. Half the town talks about you like you're nobody."
He looked up. But you're still here and you're good to us and nobody gets to say those things about you. His chin came up slightly. Not in front of me. Clara looked at the boy across from her 8 years old.
His mother's eyes and his father's face bleeding from a fight he picked on her behalf and felt something in her chest go absolutely still with the fullness of it. She didn't cry. She never cried where people could see it. That had been trained out of her by too many years of being alone with her feelings in other people's houses. But she put her hand over his on the table.
Just for a moment. "Thank you," she said. That means more than you know. He looked at her hand on his. Then he looked at her.