Things were getting too dangerous, and he didn’t need any more trouble. Besides, it wasn’t her fight. She had stood on his leaning porch in her filthy, soot-covered clothes, one hand covered in blood, and said she’d go to one of the widows’ houses and offer to help them with their passel of children instead. Either way, she wasn’t leaving. He stared at her then, thinking. Then she pulled the money out of her brassiere and, after a long moment, he let her in. They hid the money in a mason jar and sent the oldest girl, Edith, to buy cornmeal, a ham, potatoes, and five pounds of flour. Clayton gave Emma some clothes from the bottom drawer of his dresser—a faded housedress with low pockets, a blue Sunday dress with a white collar, two aprons, a cotton skirt, and a button-up blouse with a high neck. Using a needle and thread from a sewing basket she found in the storage room, Emma took in the bodices and shortened the hems to fit her petite frame, then did her best to ignore Clayton’s unsettled glances when she wore his late wife’s clothes.
