Every penny. That's not He stopped. He pulled off his hat and held it in both hands. And for a moment, he looked at the floor. And then he looked up at her with an expression she didn't know how to read.
That mare belonged to my wife, he said. The kitchen was very quiet. Her name was Beth, he said. She died 6 years ago. She was the one who picked out that horse.
She'd had her 3 years when he stopped again. His jaw tightened. When she died, Miriam set down the spoon she was holding. "I've kept that mare ever since, " he said. "Not because she's the most useful animal on the ranch.
Because he didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. " Miriam looked at this man standing in her kitchen holding his hat in both hands and she understood something suddenly that rearranged everything she thought she'd understood about Red Spur Ranch. The house that had no curtains and no pictures. The study full of books that hadn't been opened in 3 years.
The enormous house built for a family she could see now that it had been built for a family standing almost empty because the person it had been built for wasn't in it. He hadn't hired her because he needed a housekeeper. He'd hired her because an empty house had gotten to be too much to live in. She didn't say any of that. I'm sorry about your wife, she said.
He nodded once. The mare will be all right, she said. Dr. Puit said she should rest for a week, but she'll be fine. He nodded again. He put his hat back on.
He went and sat at the kitchen table, and she turned back to the stove, and neither of them said anything else for a while. But the silence between them had changed again, shifted into something with a little more weight to it, a little more texture. The way the air changes before weather moves in. Miriam served dinner. The children came in and filled up the chairs around the table, and the noise level went from zero to substantial in about 30 seconds.
And somewhere in the middle of it, she glanced up and saw Bramwell Concaid watching the chaos with an expression she'd only seen on people who were watching something they'd stopped, believing they would ever get to see again. She looked away before he noticed her looking, but she filed it away. It was Clara who broke the ice between Bramwell and the children, and she did it because she was 4 years old, and four-year-olds are diplomats of the highest and most terrible order. On the 12th day, Bramwell was repairing a fence section near the house. Clara had been watching him from the yard for the better part of an hour with the focused intensity she usually reserved for things she couldn't quite figure out.