Cleav was waiting for her.
"You didn't have to hurry," he told her as she took his arm. "Mother is lunching with the Tewksburys. I told them we'd prefer to be alone."
His smile was warm and winning, but Esme was too wrapped up in her own concerns to notice.
They walked in silence for a few minutes as Esme attempted to make order of the chaos in her mind.
"When can my family move in with us?" she blurted out suddenly.
"What?"
"When can my family move in? We've been married a week already. Don't you think that's time enough for us to be alone?"
Cleav's brows furrowed in concern. When he'd married Esme, he'd never given her family much of a thought. Was he really expected to take them in?
"I'm not sure that your family should move in with us," Cleav began cautiously.
Esme's eyes widened as she turned to look at him. "Why ever not?" she asked.
Not exactly sure how to answer that, Cleav wavered. "It's not really that customary for the bride's family to move in."
"I don't care about customary," Esme said. "I'm thinking about my family."
"Don't you wish to be alone with me? I'd gotten the impression that our privacy was something you valued."
"I do value it," she insisted. "But my family won't make our lives any more or less private. Your mother already lives with us."
"Would you have me throw my mother into the street?"
"Of course not!" Esme was as angry now as she was adamant. "I wouldn't want to throw your mother into the street, and you shouldn't want my family to be living in a cave!"
Cleav hardly knew how to argue that. In his entire life he had never seen a home that was less habitable than Yohan Crabb's mountain cave.
"Certainly I want to help your family," Cleav began tentatively. "I guess I just hadn't thought of it."
"You hadn't thought of it?" Esme was in a genuine snit. "How selfish you must think me."
"Selfish?"
"Did you think that I would marry you to live in that big house of yours just for myself?"
Cold fear cut through Cleavis like a knife.
"Sitting up in that cave," Esme continued without noticing his darkening expression, "I saw this big old house with just you and your mother, and I knew there'd be plenty of room for my whole family."
"Of course," Cleav answered very quietly.
Chapter Fifteen
Once Cleav had agreed to let her family move in, Esme was genuinely startled by his rush to make that happen. Sunday afternoon he'd left her in the store to pick out whichever fabrics she liked for her new dresses while he went up the mountain to talk to Crabb.
"You are absolutely right," he'd insisted with a strange new coldness. “My in-laws cannot live in a cave in the hills. Especially with all the sacrifices you've made."
Esme wasn't sure what he meant by "sacrifices." She supposed he was talking about all the years she'd cooked and cleaned for them. She started to ask him but wasn't given time to discuss it. A moment later, Cleav was off and gone.
By Tuesday her father and sisters had moved into the big house and Eula Rhy had taken to her bed with another attack.
"Bring the twins to the store to pick out some fabric, too," Cleav told her. "The three of you can spend the summer sewing up your new wardrobes."
