I know what all six of them are, he said. I've been living with all six of them for 8 months. She almost smiled. Bramwell, she said, Miriam, he said, don't make it a large thing, she said. Not yet.
I'm not ready for a large thing. He took a step toward her and stopped when she didn't step back. And he raised one hand and put it against her face. Just that, just his hand warm against her cheek in the evening light and looked at her in the way. He looked at things he wanted to understand precisely.
Small, he said. Yes, she said. He leaned forward and kissed her once briefly, and it was not a perfect thing in the way that moments and stories were sometimes described as perfect because she was still half afraid, and he was still half inarticulate and behind them somewhere. The sound of wade shouting for Samuel carried across the summer air as a reminder that life had not agreed to be suspended for this particular moment. But it was real, and she thought, "Real is better than perfect.
Real is what lasts." She stepped back. She looked at him. His expression was the one she'd seen for the first time in the kitchen over that, the one that was a man allowing himself to have something. "I need to start dinner," she said.
"I know," he said. Don't look at me like that or I'll be late with it. He turned back to the fence. She walked back to the house. Behind her, she heard the quiet sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
She kept walking. She was smiling by the by the time she got to the kitchen door, which she did nothing to prevent because the kitchen was empty and nobody was going to see it except her. And she thought that she had spent enough years managing her face for other people's comfort. She lit the stove. She started dinner outside the Montana evening came on slow and gold and the sound of the ranch, the animals, the children, the distant voice of August saying something to Wade.
The particular ordinary music of a place that was alive and functioning and full came through the window and filled the kitchen, and Miriam Hensley stood at the stove and let it. She thought about the note on the kitchen table in November. She thought about what it had said. Six children are too many mouths. She looked out the window at the yard where Wade had just run past chasing something that Samuel had, at the sound of Clara singing to herself somewhere near the porch at the long summer light on the hills of a ranch that had been empty and was not empty anymore.
She thought, "You were wrong, Orson. You were so completely fundamentally wrong." But she didn't say it out loud because there was no one to say it to, and because some truths didn't need an audience. They just needed to be true. She went back to the stove.