"Yes. ", people will take sides. They already are. "And you're still... " She stopped, started again. "You're still sure about what you said in the shop? " Clara, he said, and the way he said her name had the weight of everything they hadn't said yet. All the Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the note, and the blue dress, and the long honest conversations about grief and contracts, and fathers who had tried their best and still failed.
I have been sure since the morning of the festival when you picked your wages up off the dirt without looking at anyone for permission. " She breathed. "The Hargraves are still in town," she said. You should go back. I know. And when they leave, when they leave, he said, I'm going to come to the front door in full view of the street and I'm going to ask if you'd like to take a walk.
She looked at him for a long moment. "I might say no," she said. "I know that, too," he said. I'll ask anyway. He put his hat on.
He walked back through the alley. Clara stood in the doorway for a long time after he disappeared around the corner. Her hand on the doorframe, the afternoon settling around her like something deciding to stay. She was afraid. She was also, for the first time in four years, something else.
She couldn't name it yet, but it felt cautiously, and against all of her accumulated wisdom, like the beginning of something she was no longer entirely sure she wanted to refuse. The Hargraves left on a Monday. Clara knew because she heard the wagon pass the shop at half 7 in the morning, heard it without seeing it, recognized the particular weight of a departure in the way the sound moved down the street and didn't come back. She was at the workbench with a half-finished sleeve in her hands, and she set it down and looked at the front door and waited for something she couldn't name. Nothing came that morning.
Nothing came that afternoon. By evening, she had finished three pieces of work she'd been putting off for a week, reorganized her thread by color and weight, with a thorowness that Ruth would have called obsessive, and eaten supper alone in her room with a book she read the same page of four times without retaining a word. Tuesday came, she wore the blue dress. She was not going to think about the fact that she wore the blue dress. At 11:00, someone knocked at the front door.
Not the back door. The front door in full view of the street. Clara set down her needle. She smoothed the front of her apron with both hands. She walked to the door and opened it, and Ethan Callahan was standing on the step with his hat in his hand and the particular expression of a man who had made a decision and was standing in it completely.
"Good morning," he said. "Good morning," she said. "I was wondering," he said, "if you'd like to take a walk. " Clara looked at him. She looked past him at the street where Mrs. Hennessy from the dry goods store had already stopped sweeping her step to watch and where two women she recognized from the church auxiliary were standing close enough together to be sharing one conversation instead of two.
She looked back at Ethan. "Give me a moment," she said. I need to put the iron down. She went inside. She put the iron down.
She untied her apron. She hung it on the hook by the workbench. And she breathed once steadily all the way through. Then she walked back to the door and stepped out into the street beside him. She did not take his arm.
She was not ready for that. But she walked beside him and he matched her pace without comment. And they went down the main street of Willow Creek together in the late morning light while every person who happened to be looking found a reason to keep looking. "How is Eleanor? " Clara asked because it was the question she was actually thinking about and she had decided sometime in the past two weeks that she was finished with the practice of asking different questions than the ones she meant. She's well, he said she wrote to me this morning actually.
She's visiting a cousin in Billings before they return home. She sounded lighter, I think is the word, like someone who'd been holding their breath and finally let it go. And her father still unhappy. Ethan said he'll be unhappy for a while. That's is his right.
He paused. He also, it turns out, has no legal ground whatsoever. My lawyer was very clear on that point. Clara nodded. She thought about her own father and the judge that Harland Deeds had in his pocket and the difference between a man who could afford a very good lawyer and a man who couldn't afford one at all.
She did not say this, but she filed it the way she filed most things in the part of her mind that kept track of the ways the world's fairness was distributed unevenly. "There will be talk," she said. There's already talk, he said. More talk, worse talk probably, he agreed. He glanced at her sideways.
"Does that change your answer? " Clara thought about Margaret Aldridge's coins in the dirt. She thought about the women from the church auxiliary still watching from the corner. She thought about four years of building a life on the principle that needing nothing from anyone was the only form of safety available to a woman in her position. "No," she said. He didn't smile.
Not quite. But something in his face settled like a thing that had been braced for impact and found none. They walked to the end of the street and back, and it took 20 minutes. And by the time they returned to the shop door, Clara was aware that she had just performed in full view of Willow Creek, the most public act of her private life, since she had arrived in this town with $14 and a sewing kit. She was also underneath the anxiety of it, surprised to find that she was not sorry.
"Thursday," he said at the door. "Thursday," she said. What happened next was not a fairy tale. Clara had lived long enough to be suspicious of fairy tales. And Ethan Callahan, for all his considerable virtues, was no prince from a story.
He was a man with a ranch that was more complicated than it looked from the outside. A family legacy that came with obligations attached and a community that had very specific expectations of what his life was supposed to look like. The talk that came was, as predicted, worse. Not all of it was malicious. Some of it was the ordinary human compulsion to make sense of things that disrupted established patterns, but enough of it was malicious to be notable, and it was delivered with the particular efficiency of a small town that had decided on an explanation and was now distributing it widely.
The Beaumont girls told anyone who would listen that Clara Whitfield had been engineering Ethan's visits to the shop from the beginning. Margaret Aldridge, whose own visit to the shop had apparently not gone the way she intended, allowed it to be known through appropriately indirect channels that she had serious concerns about the character of a woman who had reportedly chased off a perfectly suitable young lady from a fine Billings family. And from somewhere, Clara never identified the precise origin point. A version of her family's story began circulating that bore a specific resemblance to the truth, while inverted at every crucial moral point. In this version, her father had been a man of questionable character.