I think she's lonely. Calder looked at this 9-year-old boy who had diagnosed a lame horse's emotional state accurately on his fifth day at the ranch. What name were you thinking? Calder said, "Pearl. " Jonah said it simply because Maisy's name means Pearl and Maisie can't walk very fast either and they're kind of the same. Calder put the hammer down on the porch railing.
He was almost finished building and rubbed his face with his hand for a moment. Pearl it is, he said. He picked the hammer back up. "Jonah," he said after a moment. "What?
You're going to be fine here. " Jonah handed him another nail. I know," he said, as if it were a straightforward fact he'd already assessed and settled. The second week brought its own education. Red Hollow had opinions. Red Hollow had always had opinions about weather, about land prices, about the county's various inefficiencies.
But the news that Calder Boon had taken nine orphan children off a train and installed them on his ranch had given the town something new and vivid to form opinions about, and it was doing so with genuine commitment. The feed store opinion was that it wouldn't last a month. The opinion at the barbers was divided. Half thought it was a decent thing that would fall apart for practical reasons. The other half thought it was a foolish thing that would fall apart for different practical reasons.
The opinion among the wives who gathered at the dry good store on Thursday mornings was more complicated, harder to summarize, which was usually a sign that the situation was more complicated than the men were crediting. Calder heard all of this secondhand through Wesley, who had ears like a bat and a habit of not mentioning what he'd heard until it became operationally relevant. "People think you can't do it," Wesley said. One evening when they were fixing the East Water Barrel seal and the sky was going purple and cold behind the barn. "I know.
Does that bother you? " Calder thought about it. "Only if they're right," he said. Wesley picked up the mallet. "Are they? Ask me in a year.
I'm asking you now. " Calder looked at him. Wesley was holding the mallet and looking back with that flat, careful gaze that was his default setting for conversations that mattered to him. His face gave nothing away, but the question itself gave everything away because Wesley did not ask questions he didn't need the answer to. No, Calder said. They're not right.
Wesley said nothing. He brought the mallet down on the barrel ring and it seated properly and he checked the seal and it held. Okay, he said. He didn't say I believe you. He didn't say thank you.