The way she said it, not soft, not coy, just the verdict delivered. I reached across the table and put my hand over hers. She turned her hand over and held mine back, not gripping, just held. Like two people who have already said everything that needs saying. Spring came the way spring comes on those planes, not gentle, but insistent.
Water running in places that had been frozen since October. The mud that is its own particular problem. The cattle twitchy and the horses mean with new energy. We put in a kitchen garden twice the size of the old one. She drew it out on paper first, which I had never done, and the yield that summer was better than any year before.
The Hendersons' daughter started coming around to ask her questions. Then two other women from toward Creston. She had opinions about what the soil wanted, and she was not shy about them, and she was right often enough that people came back. I watched this. I watched her in the way I'd watched her from the beginning, but different now.
The reading I'd done then was trying to know who she was. This was just watching someone be who they are. She had her own life in her, this woman, her own seriousness, her own quick dry wit that came out sideways and usually when you weren't expecting it. I'd say something straight, and she'd say something slant, and I'd laugh, that rusty laugh, and she'd look at me over whatever she was doing with that corner of her mouth moved. I'm 61 now.
That was 17 years ago. Denton married a woman from Santa Fe 2 years after our wedding. A lively woman named Cecilia, who is a better match for him than anything could have been designed. And they have three children who break things and need things and make Denton look slightly bewildered and very happy, which is a good thing to look. He and I are easy with each other.
We always were mostly. He said to me once, a few years after Nora and I married, he said, "You know I did you a favor." I said, "You did. Don't think I don't know it." He laughed, and I didn't disagree.
He did, actually, whatever he meant by it. The ranch is about 240 acres now. We took on a section to the north when the Pellegrino family moved to Denver, and we've run it with two hands who have been with us eight and 11 years, respectively. The accounts are good. Nora keeps them, and they are always good.
The north barn door was replaced entirely in 1899 because I finally admitted the frame was rotten, and the door itself was past mending. I took it down myself and felt the history of it in my hands, the weight of the wood my father had put up, and I held it for a moment before I set it on the burn pile. Nora was there. She didn't say anything. She just stood beside me.