She Warned Him She Came With Four Sons – The Rancher Said, “Good. I Need Hands on This Ranch”

Chapter 9

Caleb poured himself a cup of coffee and stood at the window, watching the first gray line of the day come up over the eastern range.

He did not know how long he stood there. Long enough for the coffee to cool. Long enough for the wind to change.

Then he heard the back door, and Etta came in from outside, her shawl pulled around her, her breath showing in the cold. She looked at him.

She was very calm. The particular calm she had when she had decided something. He had learned to read it in her, the way you learn to read the weather.

He waited.

She went to the stove and turned the biscuits.

“I wrote to Laramie,” she said.

Caleb set down his cup.

“I thanked them,” she said, without turning from the stove. “And I declined.”

Caleb was quiet.

“I also wrote to the placement agency,” she said. “I told them the arrangement stood.”

Outside, the first light was coming up over the eastern range. The horses in the corral were moving, beginning their morning. Somewhere in the barn, one of the hands was starting up, a door slamming, a voice calling across the yard.

“Etta,” Caleb said.

She turned.

He crossed the kitchen. He took her face in both his hands — a rough, warm, certain thing — and he looked at her for a moment.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t thank me,” she said. “I didn’t stay for you.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Rafe stopped wetting the bed,” she said.

Caleb laughed.

It was not a sound that came out of him often. It surprised them both. It was a low, rough thing, half-laugh and half-release, the sound of a man finding a piece of himself he had forgotten he’d lost.

Etta looked at him like she was storing the sound somewhere she would be able to find it later.

He kissed her on the forehead — a quiet, certain thing — and stepped back.

“Breakfast in twenty minutes,” he said.

“Fifteen,” she said.

He went to the door.

From the hallway came the sound of small feet — Toby up before the others, trailing his blanket, his hair a disaster of sleep. He appeared in the kitchen doorway and looked at the two of them, at the light on the floor, at the way they were standing close together, at everything.

“Are we staying?” he asked.

Etta looked at Caleb. Caleb looked at Toby.

“Get your boots on,” Caleb said. “I’ll show you how to feed the horses before breakfast.”

Toby’s face opened all the way up, like a window thrown wide. He dropped his blanket on the floor and went for his boots at a run.

Etta watched Caleb pull on his coat. “Caleb,” she said.

He turned.

“We’re staying,” she said.

He held her gaze for one moment. Then he turned and followed her son out the door.

Outside, the sky was going gold at the edges. The mountains held their snow. The windmill turned. The horses were moving in the corral, steam rising off their backs, and a small boy in boots that were on the wrong feet was running toward them across the yard, and the man walking behind him was no longer walking like a man waiting for the season to end.

He was walking like a man who had just remembered that he was allowed to want things. And that they could, sometimes, stay.