"They'll have to," he'd said. "That's the job."
"And they'll think I married one."
He hadn't answered that. There had been nothing to answer. She'd sat and looked at the star a long time. Then she'd gotten up and gone to the shelf and brought down her sewing basket and his brown duck coat, and she had cut a square of oilcloth from the cover of the flour bin and sewn the star inside the lining over his heart with the smallest stitches she knew how to make.
"There," she had said, when she bit the thread. "Now it goes where you go."
And he had put his face in his hands at that table, the only time in their three years she ever saw him do it.
Now she sat alone at the same table with the star cutting her palm, and outside the bees were making the low, anxious, all-day hum they made in autumn when the flowers were going and they could feel the cold coming and there was nothing to be done but cluster and wait.
* * *
On Thursday she drove the wagon into town for flour and coffee and lamp oil, because the dead do not eat but the living have to, and because she would not give any of them the satisfaction of seeing her hide.
She wore her gray dress and her mother's brooch and a black ribbon on her bonnet. She tied the mule at the rail in front of Ostrander's, and three men on the bench under the gallery got up and moved to the bench in front of the Gold Cross, carefully, as if she gave off a smell. She went in.
The mercantile was dim and smelled of coffee and coal oil and new leather. Pearl Ostrander was behind the counter measuring calico for a girl from the Lucero place. Hiram was on a ladder in the back with a stack of canned peaches. When the bell over the door rang they both looked, and then they both looked away, and the Lucero girl looked from one to another of them with her mouth a little open.
Nora waited until the calico was cut and paid for. Then she put her list on the counter.
"Fifty pounds of flour," she said. "Five of Arbuckle's. A gallon of coal oil. A pound of saleratus. Two spools of number forty black."