He'd said he'd had it assessed. She'd said it was a lot of work for one person. And he'd looked at her across the kitchen table with a patience that was wearing slightly at the edges and said, "I wasn't thinking one person, Clara. " She'd gone quiet. He'd let her be quiet. 3 days later she'd walked out to look at the land herself without him on a Tuesday morning while he was at Miller's and stood in the middle of the brown grass and the big western sky and turned slowly looking at the shape of it.
The slope to the south that would block the worst winter wind. The creek that ran along the north edge, small but reliable, she thought. The view east where the territory went on and on in the way that used to make her feel small and lately made her feel something else, more spacious, like the world was larger than she'd been living in. She stayed for an hour. When she got back to the shop, Ryder was sitting on the front step waiting for her, which he did sometimes when the shop was closed and he had nowhere else to be.
He looked at her when she came up the street and read her face in the way he'd gotten frighteningly good at. "What do you think? " he asked. The water access is still uncertain, she said. I know. You'd need to sink a proper well.
I know. And the slope on the south face needs fencing before winter. I know that, too. She stopped in front of him. I think, she said that it's the right land.
He looked at her. Something behind his eyes settled the way things settle when they found the right ground. He stood up. He was close. Not as close as they'd been in the shop that first evening, but close enough.
"I think so, too," he said. He bought it in October, 2 weeks before the first frost. The paperwork was signed in the lawyer's office on a Tuesday afternoon, and Ryder came to the shop afterward with the deed folded in his inside coat pocket, the good coat, the one she'd made, which he wore for things that mattered, and sat at her work table and put the deed down on the pine surface, and looked at it for a long moment, like a man who is still working out how something real feels after a long time of things being uncertain. "It's mine," he said. He said it quietly, and there was something in the quiet that told her it meant more than land.
She put her hand over his on the table. He turned his hand over and held hers. The ranch was nothing yet. A property line and a deed and a slope of brown grass and a creek that would need work. They stood on it together on the first Sunday after the purchase.
In the early November cold, the sky the palewashed blue that came before real winter. Ryder walked the boundary while Clara stood in the middle and turned slowly the way she'd turned alone in October. And she felt the same spaciousness, and it was larger now because he was in it. There, he said, coming back to where she stood, pointing at the southern rise. That's where I want to build.