"Ask Foss to arrange it." "Tessa was watching from across the table with the expression she wore when she was deciding how to feel about something. If father comes here," she said, addressing Miriam directly, "what happens." "He can't take you anywhere without a court order," Miriam said. And he's not going to get a court order, but he could come.
He could come, Miriam said. And if he does, I'm going to talk to him and it's going to be fine. Tessa looked at Bramwell. Bramwell said, "Your mother knows what she's doing." Tessa accepted this in the manner of someone who had already decided it was true and was just confirming it with additional sources.
The last week of May, Miriam was in the kitchen garden. The spring planting was two weeks behind from the late storm, and she was trying to make up time with a combination of organization and stubbornness when August came to the edge of the garden and stood there with the expression that meant he had something to say that he didn't want to say. "There's a man coming up the road," August said. She didn't look up from what she was doing. "What kind of man riding alone?
Not one of ours." He paused. "Ma'am, he matches what the hands were told to watch for. She put down the trowel. She stood up.
She looked at the road. The man riding toward Red Spur was thinner than she remembered, which was the first thing she noticed. Thinner and somehow smaller, the way people sometimes looked when you'd built them up in your head during an absence. And reality couldn't quite match the architecture of your memory. He was riding a rented horse, she could tell by the tack, and he was wearing a coat that was too light for May in Montana, which told her he'd forgotten, or had never fully internalized the particular cruelty of the territory's weather, or he'd spent so long in California that Montana had become an abstraction to him.
She walked to the front of the house. She didn't go inside for anything. She didn't go find Bramwell. She stood in the yard with the garden dirt still on her hands and she watched Orson Hensley ride up to the gate of Red Spur Ranch and stop and look at her. He looked at the house.
He looked at the barn, the bunk house, the fences in good repair, the clear evidence of a functioning, prosperous operation. Then he looked at Miriam, who was standing in the yard with her hands at her sides and her face composed, and something went through his expression that might have been surprise. He dismounted. Miriam Orson, she said. He walked through the gate.
He stopped about 10 feet from her and looked at her with the expression she remembered the slightly wounded, slightly accosatory expression of a man who had expected to find his failure somewhere other than inside himself. You look well, he said. I am well, she said. What do you want, Orson? He blinked.