She didn't build up to it or apologize for asking.
She just said, "Tell me about her," while she was writing in her household ledger and Gideon was going through the month's feed receipts.
The directness of it startled him enough that he answered before he decided to.
"Her name was Margaret," he said. "Everyone called her Maggie, except when she was annoyed, and then she preferred the whole name."
Clara looked up.
"What annoyed her?"
"Inefficiency," he said. "Waste. People who said one thing and meant another."
He was quiet for a moment.
"She was funny. Not in a performance way. She didn't tell jokes. But she saw things sideways. She'd say something completely ordinary about something ridiculous, and it would take you a second to realize it was the funniest thing you'd heard all week."
"How long were you married?"
"Seven years."
He looked at the receipt in his hand without reading it.
"She died in the spring. A fever. Three years ago this April."
"I'm sorry."
"Thank you."
He set the receipt down.
"She wanted children. We..."
He stopped.
"It didn't happen. And then she got sick."
Clara was quiet for a moment, looking at her ledger.
"That's a particular kind of loss," she said. "The kind that has more than one layer."
"Yes."
She looked up at him.
"The room at the end of the hall."
"Her sewing room," he said. "I haven't been able to... I kept meaning to. It didn't seem..."
He stopped.
"I don't know what I was waiting for."
"You weren't waiting for anything," Clara said. "You were just not ready."
She went back to her ledger.
"There's no schedule for that."
He looked at her.
He thought about the closed door.
The way his footsteps changed passing it.
The way a 10-year-old with sliding glasses had cataloged that information and handed it back to him with the calm objectivity of a weather report.
"No," he said. "There isn't."
The teaching position in Milfield had a response deadline.
Clara mentioned it on a Thursday almost in passing, the way she sometimes mentioned things she'd been thinking about for a while and had decided to say out loud without making an announcement of it.
"They need an answer by the 15th," she said.
She was kneading bread, her back to him.
Gideon looked up from the harness he was oiling at the far end of the kitchen table.
"The 15th of this month?"
"Yes."
That was 12 days away.
"All right," he said.
She kept kneading.
Her shoulders were doing a thing they did when she was carrying something and trying not to show the weight of it.
"Clara..."