"Settlements take time. " "I know. " She looked at her hands. "But the direction is set. " "Yes," he said. "The direction is set. " She looked at him across the kitchen and something in her face was different in a way that was hard to name. Not happiness exactly. Or not only that.
Relief has a particular quality when it comes after a very long time of not having it. When the body has been braced for so long it has forgotten what it felt like not to be braced. And the letting go is almost disorienting. She looked like that, like someone carefully putting down something heavy and not entirely sure yet how to stand up straight without it. He crossed the kitchen and stood in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders, not pulling her toward him, just his hands there.
And she looked at him and he looked at her, and neither of them said anything because they had both, separately and together, run out of words for what this moment was. Then Elsie came in from the hall in her socks, wanting to know what was for supper, and the moment became a different kind of moment, which was the way of things in a house with a 5-year-old in it, and that was all right, too. They married in March. He'd asked her in February, which was not a romantic setting. They were in the barn.
He was checking the mayor's strained leg, which had been healing slowly and badly from the blizzard fall, and Viven was handing him things, and the conversation had wandered through several topics before he'd said, without a great deal of preamble, "I think we should get married. " She had been handing him a cloth, and she stopped in the middle of the handoff. "Because of the legal situation? " "No," he said. The legal situation is handled. He looked at the leg and not at her. Because of the other one, "What other one? " He looked at her then.
"The one where I can't imagine this place without you in it anymore, and I'm not interested in trying. " She held the cloth. She was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when she was deciding something real. "That's not very romantic," she said. "No," he said. "It isn't. " She held the cloth a moment longer.
Then she set it on the stall door and said, "Yes, all right. Yes. " So it was that kind of proposal, and it suited them both. And in March, when the snow was still on the ground, but had gone gray and heavy at the edges, in the way that meant it was thinking about leaving, they stood on the porch of the Ashccraftoft ranch with Judge Hartley, who had ridden out from Billings for the occasion, and Sims as witness, and the Hollings, Dale, looking awkward in his good coat, and Marta with the particular expression of a woman who had been wrong about something and was making peace with it, and they said the words. Elsie stood beside Viven for the ceremony, holding her hand. And when it was done, she looked up at Vivien with a deliberateness that meant she'd been thinking about what she wanted to say and had finally decided to say it.
"Can I call you mom? " she asked. Vivien looked down at her. The March wind moved across the porch, and the mountains were white against the cold blue sky, and everything was exactly as imperfect and difficult and real as it had been all winter. "Yes," Vivian said. "You can. " She said it clearly without hesitation, and it was not a simple word in her mouth.