"I'm telling you the room is there. I'd rather it was occupied than not." A pause. "That's as plain as I know how to put it." A long pause.
The horses moved at their steady pace. The mountains rose ahead of them in the late afternoon light, holding the gold the way they always held it this time of day. "Yes," Bitsy said. He nodded once. The arithmetic settled, the direction clear.
And they rode on toward the Davis Mountains with the afternoon light moving alongside them. They returned to the Davis Mountains in the late afternoon when the light was at its best on that land, coming low off the peaks and turning the dust of the yard a particular shade of gold that Tobias had looked at 7 years running and still thought was the finest thing his ranch made in any weather. Frank put his head over the stall door and complained about 2 days without a morning carrot. Bitsy went to check the fence repair on the kitchen garden, which had held. He started a fire in the kitchen hearth.
She came in and made the coffee because she knew where it was and knew the proportions. And they sat at the table while the light moved across the worn wood in the photograph. Tobias looked at the photograph the way he always looked at it with the quiet, uncomplicated acknowledgement of a man who carries his grief without letting it become his whole geography. She would have liked you. Tobias looked at the photograph.
"Martha, she would have been your friend." A pause. "I think I would have liked her." Bitsy's voice was quiet, the words placed carefully. They drank the coffee.
Outside the mountains held the last light at their peaks and the scrubland settled into its night sounds. The poorwill calling from somewhere east of the garden fence. Frank moving in his stall. The small persistent wind through the kitchen garden where the repair was holding. That spring they married in the kitchen where Marta used to bake.
The witness was a survey agent from town named Hooper. A quiet man with no particular curiosity about other people's arrangements. Bitsy wore the beadwork her mother had made her. Ivory shells on deep blue in the Mescalero pattern. The work of many weeks.