She was the kind of person who didn't let you pretend everything was fine when it wasn't, and after a while you stopped needing to pretend. He looked at his coffee. "When she was gone, I didn't know what to do with a bad day, so I just worked through them." "For 8 years," she said.
"For 8 years." Mara was quiet for a moment. "My husband," she said, "wasn't like that. He was he needed things to look fine, even when they weren't, even to me."
She said it without bitterness, just with the specificity of someone describing a fact they've had a long time to understand. "I never knew how much carrying I was doing until he was gone, and there was suddenly only my weight instead of both of ours, and I felt lighter than I expected to, and I didn't know what to do with that, either." "That sounds lonely," he said. "It was," she said, "both during and after."
She looked at the candle. "This is not lonely." He didn't say anything for a moment. The storm outside was making enough noise that the silence between them had texture to it, not empty, not comfortable, exactly, but inhabited.
"No?" He said. "It isn't." The storm ran for 4 days, not 4 days of constant whiteout.
It pulsed the way bad Wyoming storms do, easing off for a few hours in the afternoon of the second day before coming back harder the third night, as if it was giving you just enough hope to take seriously before removing it. The drifts against the barn reached the eve. The cattle, confined and stressed, burned through feed faster than the calm calculation had accounted for. By the third day, Caleb was rationing the hay in a way that made him uncomfortable, watching the cattle's ribs and doing math he didn't like.
On the third morning, Evan said, "I can get to the south hay store." The south hay store was a secondary storage shed 30 yards from the barn that Caleb had filled in October. In good conditions, 30 yards was nothing. In current conditions, with drifts at chest height on a grown man, it was a problem.
"No," Caleb said. "I can rope a line between the barn and the shed and go hand over hand," Evan said. "I've done it before at our place. The drift along the south wall isn't as bad because of the angle of the wind."
"Your wrist?" "My left hand's fine." Caleb looked at him. The wrist had been coming along, the swelling nearly gone by now, 4 weeks in, but he hadn't told the boy that because he'd been trying to keep him off of heavy work.