Mabel stared at her.
Then she nodded once.
A soldier receiving orders.
Ruth slept.
On the second night of fever, Caleb spoke into the dark.
“Lydia used to hum while she worked,” he said. “Early mornings. I could hear her from the barn.”
Ruth kept still.
“I never told her I liked it. Kept meaning to.”
The room was quiet except for the wind.
Ruth turned her head slightly on the pillow. “After Thomas died, people kept saying I was bearing up well. So I kept bearing up. I got so good at looking fine that one day I realized I couldn’t remember what not fine felt like anymore.”
Caleb folded the cloth.
“That sounds lonely.”
“It was.”
He laid the cloth back across her forehead.
Neither of them said anything more.
The walls did not come down that night.
They simply stopped being necessary for a while.
Spring arrived like a door opening.
The snow withdrew from the fields. Mud shone in the wagon ruts. Cottonwoods silvered at the edges, and the hens began laying with renewed optimism. The Harlan house, which had been a place of hunger when Ruth arrived, became noisy in small ways.
Mabel laughed now.
Not often. Not carelessly. But truly.
Ben gained enough weight that his cheeks rounded, and he developed a habit of trying to sweep the kitchen with a broom twice his height. He always began with confidence and ended pinned beneath it, glaring as if the broom had betrayed him.
The cat finally allowed him to sit beside her.
Then, one morning, she slept on his bed.
Ben came to breakfast afterward with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose long campaign had succeeded exactly as planned.
“She’s never done that before,” Mabel said.
“He wore her down,” Ruth replied.
Mabel pressed her hands into bread dough and looked at Ruth’s rolled sleeves. She had begun rolling her own sleeves the same way.
“Is that how it works?” Mabel asked. “You just keep showing up until they let you?”
Ruth looked at her.
“Sometimes,” she said. “If you show up kindly.”
Mabel nodded as if storing that somewhere important.
Then Caleb came back from town with another letter.
This time he did not put it on the mantel.
He carried it in his hand all afternoon as if paper could burn skin.
At supper, he barely ate. After the children were asleep, he sat at the kitchen table across from Ruth.
“Town’s talking,” he said.
Ruth continued mending Ben’s shirt. “Towns do.”
“They’re talking about you being here.”
“Of course they are.”
His hand tightened on the folded letter. “Silas Greer says he’ll call the county board if I don’t settle my account by Saturday. Says a widower keeping an unrelated woman under his roof proves I’m unfit. Says the children ought to go to Nathan or Clara until I’m respectable again.”
Ruth’s needle stopped.
Silas Greer owned the general store, the grain scale, and, if rumor told true, half the debts in three townships. Ruth had seen him once at the fair, smiling with teeth too clean for an honest man.
Caleb looked at her. “I can give you my name.”
The room seemed to draw back.
