With the harvest in Clovis made no move to return to town. Roscoe did not tell her to come back, nor did Alonzo urge her to stay on the farm. Nevertheless, she stayed. She went into Highboro only once, to buy materials for two winter dresses and cloth to make half a dozen shirts for Alonzo. Sewing was a thing she had always liked to do, and now she spent her days at it, cutting paper patterns and then the cloth under the paper shapes she had pinned and trimmed. She knew just how a sleeve should be joined and how a collar was made to fit flat and neat.

Under her guidance Geraldine had turned into a tolerable cook, and Clovis wondered if it might be a good thing for Alonzo to make her his wife. She was not a bad girl, only ignorant and needing a firm hand. She half hoped Geraldine would become pregnant, and indeed wondered why she had not.

Alonzo had never been one to express himself to others, but seeing Geraldine in the kitchen, and smelling the food she cooked for them, he was not unaware of the fact that his mother’s discipline had given the girl some pride in herself and her work. This both pleased and worried him. It was pleasanter to eat good food than bad, to touch a clean woman rather than a malodorous one; but the changes in Geraldine seemed to suggest to him a feeling of responsibility for her he did not like. But it was not a pressing matter.

In a freer, easier way he enjoyed, without saying anything about it, his mother’s revival. She was busy and cheerful and, he thought, almost pretty again. Her eyes had lost their muddy, vacant look and were clear and alive. Even when she drank, and she did so still, she did not slur and confuse her thoughts and words. A glass of whiskey made her cheerful now, instead of bitter and abusive.

She sang—well, not quite, but she almost sang. He had never known her to do that. But as she worked away, shoulders hunched cozily over sewing in her lap, eyes steady and purposeful, she hummed vague stretches of melody that were not any songs he knew but were an expression of a peaceful spirit.

He began to make jokes with her—nothing anyone would actually laugh at—but references that turned on a sly word or thought, and she, while she did not laugh, would pause and get a sweeter, smoother look about her eyes and mouth, which encouraged him to speak to her more often.