When dad wrote to Missoula for a wife, he said, "Call her and I talked about it. We talked about it for a long time. " He paused. We decided that whoever came out here, we were going to make it clear that they couldn't change how this family ran. We were going to make it impossible for anyone to come in here and take over. She waited.
We were wrong. He said, "I want you to know that I know that. " Crader knows it. He's not going to say it the way I'm saying it. That's not how he's built, but he knows it. He looked at her directly.
You didn't take over. You found where you fit and you fit there and you made it bigger and you didn't ask us to move for you. You just you made the space and then you filled it without pushing us out. He stopped. I don't know if that makes sense.
It makes sense, she said. I've been wanting to say it for a while, he said. I wanted to make sure I actually said it. Thank you, she said. That took something a little, he said.
He got up. He was already done. He had said the precise thing he had come to say, and saying more would dilute it. At the kitchen door, he stopped and said without turning around, "You're good for him, for dad. He smiles more. " I didn't realize how long it had been since he smiled regular until it started again.
He went outside. She sat at the table and looked at the window and the winter light coming through it and thought about Warren's smile and how she had not been tracking it consciously, but knew when she considered it that EMTT was right. Warren did smile more. He was not a demonstrative man and he was not going to become one. But there there was something restored in him that had been absent a quality of presence of being actually in the room rather than adjacent to it.
Going through the motions of living in a house he'd retreated from without quite knowing it. He made decisions without the second-guing that had marked his early conversations with her. He told stories at supper more often. He came in from the barn some evenings and leaned in the kitchen doorway and just looked at the room at the people in it with an expression that was quiet and specific and not quite nameable. She loved him.