She was cheerful about it in a practical way. Without romanticism, chickens were chickens. They required consistent care, and consistent care was something Nelly had understood since before she could name it. She stayed on the ranch the longest of all of them. She was still there when Cder's hair went white.
Still there when his hands got stiff in the cold mornings, still checking her flock before dawn the way she always had. Benny never entirely lost his wildness, but he found places to put it. He became, by his early 20s, the person in Red Hollow who knew everything and everyone, not through any deliberate strategy, but because he had been talking to people since he arrived, and had never stopped. He carried messages, arranged transactions, knew which neighbor needed help before they asked for it, knew which strangers coming through town were passing through and which were worth watching. The feed store owner eventually made him a part of the operation because it was more efficient than pretending he wasn't running half of it informally.
Anyway, he lost the string on his wrist somewhere in his 15th year and replaced it with a leather band he made himself, which he wore for the rest of his life. When people asked about it, he told them it was a reminder to check before you go. Most people assumed this meant something practical, like checking equipment or provisions. It did mean that it also meant something else, and Benny did not always explain the difference. Rose and Ruth remained inseparable until Ruth married a farmer from the next county when they were 23, and even then they were more adjacent than separate.
Ruth's farm was 12 mi from Red Hollow, and she came back at least twice a month, and there were weeks when she was at the ranch more than at her own property. Rose never married, not from lack of opportunity, but from apparent lack of interest in reorganizing her life around someone else's priorities. She ran the household accounts for the ranch until she started doing the same for three other ranches in the area, and then it became its own work, and she charged for it. The twins never needed to be told to do anything twice. This had been true at 8 and remained true at 30 and 40 and beyond, and it was the quality that both Calder and Wesley had relied on most heavily in the years when the ranch had been finding its footing.
Maisie grew up at the center of all of it. Not because she demanded it, but because she was, in some way that was hard to articulate the reason the center held. She was the one who had reached her arms out to a stranger on a train platform and made a decision before anyone else had made theirs. She was the one who had waited in a dark bedroom during a storm with absolute certainty that he would come back. She was not easy as an older child or as a young woman.
She was stubborn and opinionated, and she had a temper that came from somewhere deep, and that she managed with varying success depending on the circumstances. She argued with Calder regularly about decisions she thought were wrong and was sometimes right and sometimes not and was honest about both outcomes. But she was the one who when Calder's hands got too stiff for fine work showed up without being called. She was the one who organized the family gatherings that happened three or four times a year. When the house was full of people who had grown up there and people who had married into it and children who had been born into it and who managed the logistics of feeding all of them with an efficiency she had absorbed from Clara and a cheerfulness that was entirely her own.
She was 26 when she sat with Calder on the porch on a late summer evening. The two of them alone for the first time in what felt like weeks. The house empty for once because Wesley and Jonah had taken the younger grandchildren fishing at the creek. You ever think about that day? She said he knew which day she meant.
Sometimes I don't actually remember it. She said I was asleep for most of it. Wesley told me what happened. What did he tell you? That you slammed your fist on a counter and said we were all yours.