"I am." He climbed down from the wagon. He was taller than she'd estimated. He held his hat in his hand and turned it once by the brim, a gesture that might have been courtesy or might have been nerves, she couldn't tell which. "I apologize for the time.
I had a—" He stopped. "There was a delay." "It's all right," Clara said. "I had nowhere pressing to be." He looked at her for a moment with an expression she couldn't read.
Then he reached down and picked up her carpet bag before she could object. "The ranch is about 6 miles out," he said. "We've got daylight." "Mr. Callahan."
He stopped. "Is there anything about the position I should know before we make that ride?" She asked. Anything that wasn't in the advertisement? Something moved behind his eyes.
It was brief and she might have imagined it, but she didn't think she had. He set her bag in the back of the wagon and turned toward her with his hat still in his hands. "The house is large," he said carefully. "More rooms than I've managed to keep up. The kitchen needs attention.
The garden's gone, too." He stopped again. "There's a fair amount of work to be done." "I'm not afraid of work," Clara said. "No?"
He said, looking at her steadily. "I didn't figure you were." He helped her up onto the wagon seat without asking if she needed it, which she found she didn't mind. They pulled out of Red Valley heading north and Clara watched the town drop away behind them. She did not ask him any more questions.
He did not volunteer anything. For 6 miles they rode in a silence that was not entirely comfortable and not entirely uncomfortable either. The land opened up around them into something vast and heat shimmered, broken only by the occasional fence post or distant stand of scrub oak. The sky above Texas in July was its own kind of violence, enormous and pale blue and absolutely relentless. Clara kept her hands folded in her lap.
She was practical by nature. She made a mental list, assess the kitchen first, the sleeping quarters second, the general state of repair third. She would know within 24 hours what the job actually required. She was still thinking about the kitchen when the ranch came into view. It was a good-sized spread.
That much was clear even from the road. The main house was two-story built solid, the kind of structure that had been put up by someone who intended to stay. There was a barn and two outbuildings and a corral where three horses stood with their heads low in the heat. The fencing needed work in two places she could see from here and the front porch had a board that had warped away from the frame, but it was not a failed place. That was what she noticed.
It was a place that was fighting to hold itself together and only losing the battle in the small ways. Thomas Callahan pulled the wagon around to the front of the house and set the brake. Clara had her hand on the side of the wagon ready to step down when she saw them. They were on the porch. Four of them, standing in a line without having arranged themselves into one, the way children sometimes simply arrive in formation without knowing they've done it.