"With what we have." "Yes." "What if the cattle" "One thing at a time." He said. "The storm is the thing tonight.
Everything else is tomorrow's problem." She looked at him. "You're not worried." "I'm always worried."
He said. "I've just found worrying about everything at once isn't useful." She considered this. "That's practical." She said.
"It's survival." He said. The wind hit the house with a sound like a wave hitting a wall, and the candle flame went sideways even through the glass. From down the hall came the brief sound of Owen murmuring in his sleep, then silence. They sat at the table for a while without talking.
The stove ticked. The storm went on. At some point she got up and put more wood in the stove, and he noticed she'd been watching the temperature of the room the same way he had. Calibrating without discussion. She sat back down and pulled the quilt tighter.
"Tell me something." She said. "About before." He looked at her across the table. "Before what?"
"Before all of this was" "what it is now." She wasn't pressing. She was asking in the same way she asked things she actually wanted to know, which was directly but without urgency, like the question would wait if he needed it to. He thought about what to tell her. There was a version of before that was just the facts, the ranch, Clara, the accident, the years after.
He'd told those facts before, or parts of them, to Lucy that afternoon by the fence. Facts were manageable, but Mara was asking something slightly different, and they both knew it. "I was different." He said finally. "When Clara was alive.
I'm not saying better." "Different. More willing to" "I don't know the right word. More willing to be seen having a bad day, maybe.