And finally, she walked over to him and stood next to him in silence for a moment and then said, "Why don't you have any children? " Bramwell looked at her. He was quiet for a moment. "I did have, " he said for a little while. Clara considered this.
Where did they go? They went to be with their mother, he said. She accepted this the way four-year-olds accept things completely and without further questions and then said, you can share ours if you want. We have a lot. Bramwell looked at this small person with dark eyes like her mothers and said nothing for a long moment.
That's a generous offer, he said finally. I know, said Clara. Wade says I'm too generous. He says I gave away his last marble last week. She looked thoughtful, but he wasn't using it.
Bramwell made a sound that might have been a laugh, quickly suppressed. Miriam was watching from the porch. She'd heard every word. She told herself she wasn't feeling anything particular about it, and she was mostly kidding herself.
By the end of the third week, the ranch had changed. Not dramatically, not in ways that anyone would have necessarily pointed at and named, but it had changed the way the air changes between one season and the next gradually and then all at once, so that one morning you stepped outside and realized it was different without being able to say exactly when the difference had started. The children's laughter was in the house now. Wade spent every spare minute in the barn, and two of the ranch hands, Denny, and an older man named August, who had been with Bramwell for 15 years, had taken on the job of teaching him things about horses with the seriousness of men who understood they were teaching someone something important. Tessa had worked her way through two of the books in the study, and started a third.
8-year-old Nell had appointed herself the official keeper of the chicken coop, which she ran with an efficiency that would have impressed most adults. 10-year-old Samuel was shadowing August wherever he went, asking the kind of questions that made August look at the boy sideways and then answer them more completely than he'd intended. And Henry, who was six and had barely spoken in the first week, still shocked, Miriam thought by what had happened, by the father, who had gone without saying goodbye, had begun following Bramwell around the property, not asking anything, not talking particularly, just following. Bramwell let him. He didn't make a performance of it.
He didn't slow down or adjust what he was doing or draw special attention to the child at his heel. He just let Henry be there. And occasionally, he'd explain what he was doing. Briefly, practically, the way you'd explain something to a person whose understanding of the explanation mattered, and Henry would listen and nod. One afternoon, Miriam saw Henry reach up and take Bramwell's hand while they were walking back from the barn.
Bramwell looked down. He didn't pull away. He closed his hand around Henry's and kept walking. Miriam turned and went back inside the house because she was suddenly busy and needed to be somewhere else very quickly. She stood in the kitchen and looked at the wall for a moment and told herself firmly that she was not going to make anything complicated out of a man being decent to a six-year-old boy who needed someone to be decent to him.