"Go wash up and wake your brothers. " He looked at her for a moment, then he went. She heard him on the stairs, heard him knock on doors, heard the low rumble of protest from the older boys and the sharp thud of what was probably a boot thrown in Thomas's direction, and then more boots on the floor and water splashing in the basin and the whole machinery of a house waking up. They came down in pieces. William first, then the twins. She was still learning to tell apart.
They were the 12-year-old she'd learned their names were Henry and James, but hadn't yet matched the names to the faces with any certainty. Then Eli who arrived in the kitchen still holding the pine cone he'd apparently taken to bed with him, and finally Samuel, who came in last with his hair combed and his expression already arranged into the careful neutrality of a boy who had decided not to be impressed by anything until he'd had sufficient reason to be. Ethan was not with them. "Where's your oldest brother? " Emily asked Thomas, who seemed to function as a general information source for the household. "Barn. " Thomas said.
"He gets up at 4:00 to do the early milking. He doesn't eat breakfast with us. " She put a bowl aside and covered it with the cloth. They ate. All six or five with Ethan's portion waiting, and the eating was different from the night before in a way she noticed immediately. Less wary.
Still not easy, not comfortable in the way that was earned over years, but less braced. Like a room where someone had opened a window that had been stuck shut. Eli sat beside her. She had not arranged that. He had simply arrived at the table and chosen the chair beside hers with the absolute certainty of a 6-year-old who does not yet second-guess what he wants.
He ate his beans with serious attention and then partway through set his spoon down and said to his bowl, "Our mama used to make beans. " The table went quiet. Not a dramatic silence. A held silence. The difference between holding your breath and stopping breathing. Emily did not reach for him, did not make a production of it.
She simply said, "What did she put in them? " Eli looked up. "Brown sugar. " he said. "And a piece of ham if we had it. " "I'll remember that. " she said. "Next time I'll try it her way. " She felt she didn't look up to confirm, but she felt Ethan in the doorway behind her. He had come in from the barn and was standing there, and she knew it before she heard him move the same way you know when the temperature in a room changes.
She turned. He was at the washstand, sleeves rolled up, working the pump, and his back was to the table, but his shoulders had changed from what they'd been the night before. Something in the set of them. "Sit down, Ethan," she said. "I kept you a bowl. " A pause.
Then, without turning around, "I usually eat in the barn. " "Not today," she said. Another pause, longer. He dried his hands and sat down. Nobody commented on it. She set his bowl in front of him and poured his coffee and went back to the stove and the table resumed its noise, and that was all.
But she noted it, filed it away. Ethan, who had told her flatly that no one lasted, had sat down at the breakfast table because she had asked him to. That was not nothing. Jacob came in when they were nearly finished. He'd clearly been up for hours.
There was already dried mud on his boots, and his sleeves were rolled up despite the morning cold. He stopped just inside the door, the way he had the night before, looking at the table at his sons eating in the same room at the same time, which apparently was not the ordinary state of things. "Coffee's on the stove," Emily said. He poured himself a cup without being told twice, and he stood at the counter and drank it standing up, watching the table, and she let him stand. He wasn't ready to sit yet.
That was all right. He would get there. After breakfast, the boys scattered chores, barn work, the particular organized chaos of a working ranch in the morning, and Emily began to think about what needed doing inside the house. She started in the kitchen because that was the territory she had already claimed, and she worked her way out from there. The problem was immediately apparent.
It wasn't just that the house was untidy. Houses got untidy. It was that the house had been unmaintained in a specific way, the way of a household where the person who had understood how a household worked was gone, and everyone left behind was doing their best in her absence. But best wasn't the same as knowing. The pantry was disorganized in a way that meant things got used in the wrong order, and staples ran out unexpectedly.
The storage off the kitchen had dried goods stacked without sense. The linens in the cupboard upstairs were clean, but folded wrong, which meant they didn't stack right, which meant the cupboard door didn't close fully, which meant they were gathering dust at the edges. She was reorganizing the pantry when Samuel appeared in the kitchen doorway. "What are you doing? " he said. "Reorganizing the pantry," she said.
"Why? " "Because your flour is in front of your salt, and your cornmeal is behind your dried apples, and the next person who goes to get cornmeal is going to knock the apple jar off the shelf. " He stared at her. "Has that happened? " she asked. A pause. "Twice," he said. "Then that's why. " She handed him a tin.
"Hold this. " He held it. She wasn't sure he knew he was going to until he was doing it. "You organized things back in Boston? " he asked. "I worked as a seamstress," she said. "Before that, I worked in a dry goods store.
Before that, I kept my mother's house. I've organized a few pantries. " "Why'd you stop being a seamstress? " She paused. Just for a moment. Then she took the tin back from him and put it on the correct shelf. "Business got thin," she said.
That was true. It was also only part of the truth. The other part of the truth was that the woman she had shared a workroom with had married and moved to Ohio. And the room above the shop she'd rented had gone to another tenant, and she had found herself at 29 years old with skills and no circumstances in which to use them, and an advertisement in the paper from a Montana rancher and a moment of either courage or desperation. She still wasn't entirely certain which in which she had written a letter.
Samuel seemed to understand that there was more to the answer than she had given and to his credit he didn't press. "Ethan thinks you'll be gone by Friday. " he said instead. "What do you think? " He leaned against the doorframe, considered. "I think you reorganized the pantry. " he said. "Women who are planning to leave don't reorganize pantries. " She looked at him.
He had his father's eyes and his mother's. She didn't know what his mother had looked like, but something in the boy's face was clearly inherited from someone who had thought carefully about things. "You're a sharp kid, Samuel. " she said. He looked away immediately, like the compliment had touched something he wasn't prepared for. "Don't call me a kid. " he said, but there was no heat in it.
The morning moved. She finished the pantry, started on the main room, and was in the middle of beating the dust out of the curtains in the hallway using a broom handle, which was not ideal, but was what was available when she heard shouting from outside. Not alarmed shouting, angry shouting. Two voices. She went to the front window.
In the yard below, Ethan and William had stopped whatever they had been doing and were standing 3 ft apart in the kind of posture that meant they had been arguing for longer than the shouting suggested. William's hands were at his sides, fists loose, shoulders high. Ethan's jaw was set. She couldn't make out the words from inside. She watched.
Whatever William said next, Ethan answered it by turning his back and walking away, which was clearly not the response William wanted because William grabbed his older brother's arm and turned him around and said something directly into his face. Ethan shoved him. Not a fight one shove, flat-handed decisive. A shove that said, "End this. " William stumbled back a step, caught himself, and his face went from angry to something else. Hurt, yes, but underneath the hurt, a kind of desperate tiredness that had no business being on a 14-year-old's face.
Then he walked away in the opposite direction. Ethan stood alone in the yard. He put his hands on his hips and tilted his head back and looked at the sky, the way men look at the sky when they are trying very hard not to feel what they are feeling. She went back to the curtains. She did not go outside and insert herself.
That was not what was needed. But that afternoon, when she was in the kitchen starting supper and Ethan came in for water, she said without looking up from what she was doing, "William worships you. " Ethan stopped at the pump. "He doesn't," he said. "He does," she said. "Boys who don't care about someone don't get that hurt when they're pushed away.
He's watching everything you do. You're the measure of things for him. " Ethan said nothing. The pump handle moved. Water ran. "I'm not asking you to be someone you're not," she said.
"I'm just telling you what I see. " He dried his hands. He didn't leave immediately, which she'd learned meant he was processing something. "My father," he said finally, "used to say that. That I was the measure of things. " "After Mama died," he said, he stopped, revised. "He stopped saying it.
He stopped saying most things. " "I know," she said. Not because she did know, she didn't not specifically, not yet, but because she understood the shape of it. Grief does that. " "He's not grieving," Ethan said, and there was a sudden sharpness in his voice that hadn't been there before. He's just gone. He's here, but he's gone.