He found Clara in the kitchen. The children had gone to bed. She was washing the last of the supper dishes, and the lamp threw her shadow long against the wall. There is a room for you, he said. Across the hall from mine.
It has a stove and a window. It is yours. Clara turned from the basin. Her hands were wet. She looked at him and for the first time since she had arrived at this ranch.
Eli Holden looked back, not past her, not at the table or the ledger or the floor, at her. Thank you, she said. I will move my things tonight. There is no hurry, he said. There is, she said, not unkindly, not with any weight, just the truth, spoken by a woman who had been patient for long enough.
She moved her trunk that night. It was light because it was empty, and she carried it herself, and she set it at the foot of a real bed in a real room with a fire already burning and a quilt already spread. She sat on the edge of the mattress and she put her hand flat on the fabric and she closed her eyes. In her apron pocket, the brass button pressed against her hip. She took it out and set it on the windowsill where the morning light would find it.
The letter to Cheyenne went unanswered. By January, it did not need an answer. Spring came the way it always comes to Wyoming. Not gently, but all at once, as if the land had been holding its breath since November. And finally let go.
The snow pulled back from the yard in long gray sheets, and the creek broke open with a sound like a rifle shot, and the grass came up through the mud, pale and new and so green it almost hurt to look at. June was in the kitchen with Claraara, standing on a stool at the counter, her hands white to the wrists in biscuit dough. She had flour on her nose and she was humming something with no particular tune, just a sound she made when she was content. The way a kettle hums when the water is not yet boiling, but the heat is there. Samuel was at the table reading aloud from a book Clara had ordered from the supply catalog.
His voice was steady and clear, and when he came to a word he did not know, he looked up at Claraara and she said it once, and he repeated it and kept going. The cameo brooch was pinned to Claraara's collar. She wore it every day now, the way you wear something that was given to you by someone who meant it. Eli stood in the doorway. He did not enter the kitchen.