"I'm not running a—" He stopped. "I've got a working ranch. I need a cook, not a family situation." "I understand that," she said.
She put her hands in her lap, folded one over the other, and looked at him with an expression that was neither apologetic nor aggressive, just very, very steady. "But I'll tell you how it is, Mr. Thorne, because I don't see any point in wasting your time or mine. I don't go anywhere without them, and they don't go anywhere without me.
That's not a condition I'm asking you to like. It's just the truth. So, if that's a problem, you tell me now, and I'll turn this wagon around, and we'll both have saved ourselves an afternoon." The wind moved between them.
One of his horses nickered at the mule. "How old?" He said. "12, 8, and 5."
He looked at the wagon again. Nothing moved. "They're not going to just sit in there," he said. "No," she said.
"They won't." He should have told her to go. He knew that the way you sometimes know a thing clearly and do the opposite anyway for reasons you can't fully name until later when you're lying awake at 3:00 in the morning. He'd been alone for 8 years.
He'd constructed his life around the absence of other people, had gotten so used to the silence that it had stopped feeling like loss and started feeling like something he'd chosen. Having three children on his property would destroy every habit he'd built. He was 45 and tired and his back hurt on cold mornings and he was not equipped for this. "You can come look at the kitchen."
He said. Her name was Mara and she walked into his kitchen the way a general walks into a room that's been poorly managed and is about to be put right. She didn't say anything critical. She didn't have to.
He watched her eyes move across the dry sink, the cold stove, the shelf of supplies that had gotten down to salt pork and a nearly empty flour sack and some coffee that was past its best days. She opened a cabinet, looked inside, closed it. She checked the stovepipe for blockage. She ran a hand along the counter and looked at what came off on her palm.
"I can work with this." She said. "It needs work." He admitted.