Clara launched herself at both of them simultaneously, which broke the moment in the best possible way. And after that, it was food and noise and the children running and the ranch hands eating more than was strictly their share, and August getting into an argument with Ferris about something that had nothing to do with the occasion and everything to do with the fact that they were both men who needed to be right about things. It was imperfect and loud and exactly right. Late in the afternoon, when the guests had begun drifting home, and the children were winding down in the particular boneless way of children who have been excited for too long, Miriam found herself standing at the edge of the yard with a cup of coffee that had gone cold, looking out at the hills. The light was the specific gold of Montana September, the kind that made everything look like it meant something.
Bramwell came and stood beside her. They were quiet for a moment. "There's something I want to say, " he said. "Go ahead. " He was quiet a beat longer in the way he was quiet when he wanted to say something correctly.
When Elizabeth died, he said, "I thought I understood what I'd lost. The person, the future we were going to have. " He paused. But what I didn't understand until this year was that I'd also stopped believing the future was for me. I kept the ranch going.
I kept everything working. But I'd stopped thinking there was anything ahead of it worth moving toward. Miriam listened. Your children gave that back to me before you did, " he said. Henry's hand, Clara's questions.
Tessa arguing with me about a book. He looked out at the hills. I want you to know I understand what they are. They're not yours that I'm tolerating. They're mine because I decided they were, and that's the same as any other kind.
She looked at him. I know, she said. I've known that since February. He nodded slowly. I just wanted to say it out loud, he said.
So, it's not just a thing I'm thinking. She recognized her own words, the ones she'd said to Tessa in the kitchen a lifetime ago. She thought about how ideas moved between people who were paying attention to each other, how they seeped in and took root without announcement. It's a good habit, she said. He put his arm around her, which was not something he did easily, and she leaned against him, which was not something she did easily, and they stood there in the September light and looked at the ranch that had been empty and wasn't anymore.
The years that followed were not a story of everything going right. They were a story of everything being real. There were bad winters and lean years and a dispute with a neighboring ranch over water rights that took 2 years and cost more in legal fees than either of them wanted to think about and which they won eventually through the same method they'd used with everything else documentation patience and the willingness to outlast someone who expected them to give up. Bramwell broke his left hand badly in the autumn of their third year, and Miriam ran the ranch accounts and the outside operations both for three months, while he healed and drove them both half mad with the enforced stillness of it. Miriam got sick the following spring, seriously enough that Bramwell slept in a chair beside her bed for 9 days, and came out of it looking 10 years older and not willing to talk about it.