She said, I've always been old, Tessa said. I just got tall enough for people to notice. They arrived at Red Spur Ranch the following afternoon. Miriam had packed everything they owned into two bags and a flack, which gave her children something to carry and gave herself something to hold on to. The wagon Bramwell sent was driven by the young ranch hand from the day before who told them his name was Denny and then apparently exhausted his conversational capacity for the entire 2-hour journey because he didn't say much of anything else until they reached the gate.
The ranch was larger than she'd expected. The main house was two stories, built from timber that had been cut and set with genuine care, not the rough and ready construction of a homestead made in a hurry, but the work of someone who'd intended it to last. There was a barn that could hold 20 horses, a bunk house set back at a respectful distance, a root cellar, a smokehouse, fences that were in good repair, a kitchen garden that had been properly put to bed for winter. It was a well-built place. It was also, she noticed immediately, almost entirely empty of anything personal.
No curtains, no pictures on the walls, no indication that anyone lived there who had any interest in making it feel like they lived there. It was a house that someone owned and maintained and inhabited without ever quite moving into. Bramwell was waiting in the yard. He showed them the house himself, the kitchen, which was large and well stocked, the two rooms on the second floor that had been prepared for the children, with enough beds and blankets for all six, the room beside it that would be hers, with a solid door in the lock she'd specified. The younger children were overwhelmed into silence for the first 5 minutes.
Then 7-year-old Wade saw the barn. "Can I see the horses?" He said. Wade Miriam started. After you're settled, Bramwell said to the boy, not harshly, but firmly, with the particular tone of someone who had opinions about when things happened and didn't consider it negotiable, "Help your mother first."
Wade looked at him for a moment, then said, "Yes, sir." In a voice that suggested he was trying it out and found it acceptable and went to carry in a bag. Miriam watched this exchange. She didn't say anything about it, but she noticed. The first week was awkward in the way that new arrangements between strangers always are full of small calibrations and careful silences, and the sense of everyone testing where the lines were before anyone was ready to draw them out loud.
The ranch hands ate in the bunk house. Bramwell ate at the kitchen table, which meant Miriam cooked for him in the evenings, which she'd expected from the agreement, and which put her in the position of being in the same room with him at the end of the day, when both of them were tired, and the children had been settled, and there was nothing to do but sit across a table from each other. While the fire settled and the dark pressed against the windows, he didn't make conversation for its own sake. Neither did she. The silences between them were not comfortable exactly, but they were not hostile either.
They were the silences of two people who had both spent enough time with bad words filling rooms that they'd stopped, assuming silence was something that needed to be fixed. On the fourth evening, he looked up from his plate and said, "Your children have good manners." "They didn't get them from their father," she said before she'd decided whether to say it. He looked at her for a moment. "No," he said.
Said, "I didn't expect they did." She went back to her food. Something in the room shifted slightly, like the angle of light changing without the sun actually moving, and neither of them commented on it. On the fifth day, 10-year-old Tessa found the study. It was a room off the main hallway that Miriam had assumed was a storage room, and she'd been startled when she opened the door and found instead four shelves of actual books, not almanacs and farming guides, but novels and histories and one whole shelf of what appeared to be natural science.
She'd closed the door again quickly, not sure whether she was supposed to be in there. But Tessa, who had a particular relationship with closed doors, and the interesting things that might be behind them, had found it on her own. Miriam discovered her in there that afternoon, cross-legged on the floor with a book open in her lap, reading with the focused, slightly absent expression she got when a book had captured her completely. Tessa, that room may not be for us to Mr. Concaid says I could, Tessa said without looking up.