You don't have to do all of this yourself, she looked up. I know, she said. But I want to understand every part of it. I don't want to sit in a courtroom and have things happen around me that I don't fully understand. I did that for 13 years with Orson.
She looked back at the paper. I'm not doing it again. He sat down across from her. He pulled a piece of paper toward himself. Tell me what to write, he said.
They worked at the kitchen table for 2 hours that evening, Miriam organizing and Bramwell writing his account in his direct spare handwriting. And at the end of it, they had a document that Foss, when he received it, described in his return letter as the most organized witness preparation he had encountered in 20 years of practice. He wrote this with what appeared in the dry, careful language of a Helena, a lawyer, to be genuine surprise. The court date was the 14th of June. The 2 and 1/2 weeks between Orson's appearance at the ranch and the hearing had a particular quality that Miriam would remember afterward as the feeling of a held breath, not paralyzed, not passive, but contained in the way that things are contained just before they move.
She kept working. The ranch kept running. The children kept being children, which helped because children had no patience for suspended animation and kept pulling the world back to the immediate and concrete. Wade's mayor, the younger one August, had put in his care, developed a mild lameness in the left foreleg and required twice daily attention, which Wade provided with a focus that left no room for anxiety about fathers and court dates and lawyers in San Francisco. Nell's chicken enterprise had expanded through a negotiation with Bramwell that Miriam had only partially been party to to include a second coupe and two additional hens.
And Nell managed this with the seriousness of a person running a small business, which was essentially what she was doing. Clara had decided she was going to learn to read before autumn and had appointed Tessa as her teacher and was applying herself to this project with the specific terrifying energy of a 5-year-old who has decided something is going to happen. Henry stayed close to Miriam. He'd been doing this since Orson's visit, not in an anxious, clingy way, but in the particular way of a child who has located the safest thing in his vicinity, and is maintaining proximity to it, without making a production of the fact. He helped her in the kitchen more.
He sat near her in the evenings. When Bramwell was around, he divided his time between them in a way that was so natural and unself-conscious that it made Miriam's chest ache in a way she couldn't entirely explain. One evening, about a week before the hearing, she heard Henry and Bramwell talking in the barn. She hadn't been looking for them. She'd come to check on the mare's lameness, and she stopped outside the stall when she heard Henry's voice inside.
"Will the judge make us go back?" Henry said, Bramwell's voice low and even. "No." How do you know? Because your mother has been building a case for 3 months that any judge in Montana would have a hard time arguing with.
A pause. And because the law is on your side, father has a lawyer, too. He does. Lawyers cost money. Where did he get money if California didn't work?