The boy holding the gray gelding had wound the lead around his wrist. Ruth saw it from fifty yards away and felt the old pull in her own hand.
Harlan Voss stepped out of the horse's reach. He kept his voice low enough that Ruth couldn't hear it. The boy shook his head. Harlan said something else, smiling, and held out his own wrist. Whatever foolishness he demonstrated made the boy laugh. He unwound the rope.
Ten years, and Harlan still knew how to make a lesson look like a joke at his own expense.
Ruth rode up with dust on her skirt and twelve hundred dollars sewn inside her coat. It was October of 1887. She had come through half of New Mexico Territory to make this deal before winter. At thirty-four, she had intended to arrive as a horse buyer. At the sight of him she was sixteen again, wanting him to notice that she had ridden well.
He put a hand over his eyes.
“Lord help me. That can't be Ruth Calder. Ruth Calder wrote that she'd arrive before dinner.”
“I wrote Tuesday.”
“Every Tuesday has a dinner.”
“And you eat all of them, from the look of you.”
He laughed with his whole face. He was heavier through the middle, his hair thinner, but his hands were the same: the forefinger bent where a colt had broken it, the square nails, the white scar crossing the left thumb. He caught her boot as she swung down and then let go, remembering she wasn't a child.
“Well,” he said.
She kissed his cheek. His whiskers smelled of tobacco and the yellow soap he had used when she lived here.
“Well yourself.”
The boy watched, still holding the gray. Harlan introduced him as Luis Varela. Ruth remembered a small child asleep in a box lined with a flour sack, Carmela cooking with one foot rocking it.
“You were shorter,” she told him.
“So were most things.”
Harlan chuckled. “That's Carmela's boy. Don't offer him an opening unless you mean to stand in it.”
Luis looked Ruth over, not quite rudely. His glance stopped on Lark's bridle, its mended cheekpiece, the place a second hand had polished her rifle stock. Ruth knew what he was doing. She did it herself before she bought anything.
“Your mother's here?”
“She's working.”
There was a pause in which Ruth couldn't find a sensible reply. Harlan took Lark's reins.
“Feed first. Both of you. Then we'll see whether all those letters about prices were business or flirtation.”
The sale horses occupied the north pasture, a broad pale rise under the hills. Ruth looked that way as they walked. Sixty head selected from Harlan's breeding and saddle operation, he had written: mature mares and geldings, useful animals, familiar with a rope and most with a saddle. A lot she could sell in smaller parcels over the next year. She had spent three years accumulating her deposit. The remaining balance would be owed to Harlan, on terms she meant to bargain hard over.
“I won't buy a tender foot because I knew its grandmother,” she said.
“Then don't ask after their grandmothers. Saves time.”
He stopped to feel Lark's near foreleg. The mare tolerated it with her lower lip loose.
“You've looked after this one.”
“She earns it.”
“That's not always what earns looking after.”
It was such a Harlan thing to say that Ruth smiled before deciding whether she agreed.
He led her into the house through the kitchen. Carmela stood at the board with flour on her hands. Teresa Baca worked a dough trough beside her. A girl with Teresa's straight brows was lifting rounds onto a cloth.
Ruth stopped in the doorway.
“Carmela.”
The woman looked up. There was gray at her temples now. Ruth remembered how firmly those hands had caught her shoulders when, at seventeen, she had tried to carry a pot of boiling water through a crowded kitchen.
“You came,” Carmela said.
“I said I would.”
“Yes.”
Harlan reached past Ruth for a biscuit. Carmela slapped the back of his fingers with the flat of her knife. He stole one with the other hand and departed in triumph. The girl laughed. Teresa didn't.
“He's still quick,” Ruth said.
“When he wants something,” Carmela said. “Sit down. There's stew.”
On the shelf above the stove stood Ruth's old cup, blue with a white chip beside the handle. Harlan must have kept it. She took it down, oddly embarrassed by how much she wanted to put her hands around it.
“I thought this would be gone.”
“He said leave it,” Carmela told her.
Ruth ate at the kitchen table because the dining room had never felt like home. A small girl peered around Carmela's skirt at her boots. Teresa sent the older girl, Inés, for water and asked Ruth whether she was still buying for other men.
“For myself now.”
“All sixty?”
“If they're sound.”
Teresa pressed the dough harder than seemed necessary. “He sells the sound things.”
Carmela put another ladle of stew into Ruth's bowl. Outside, someone called for Mateo, and the small girl darted toward the door until her mother caught the back of her dress without turning around.
“Eva. Finish.”
“I finished.”
“Then finish again where I can see you.”
It should have made Ruth laugh. Instead she looked down at the stew, thick with beans and meat, and wondered what she had interrupted.
That afternoon she walked the sale lot with Harlan. The horses came toward his salt sack, dusty backs shifting in the light. He told her about a gelding's tricks, a mare's easy foaling, the boy who had ridden through a water trough rather than admit he couldn't stop. Ruth knew half the dams and every hill beyond the fence. She began naming prices. He accused her of attempting to rob a widower.
“You were a widower when you taught me to bargain.”
“And a fool, evidently.”
At supper he produced a jar of preserved apricots. Her favorite. He had written for them from a store two settlements away.
She lay awake afterward in her old room, hearing horses move beyond the wall. The ceiling still bore the crooked patch where Harlan had repaired a leak above her bed. He had done it in a thunderstorm, cursing, while she held the lamp and pretended she wasn't afraid.
The cup, the apricots, the patch. He had kept a place for her.
In the kitchen a pan struck another pan. Then Teresa's voice, sharp, and Carmela answering too low for Ruth to hear. She nearly got up. But there were always quarrels in a house full of work, and she was tired, and tomorrow she had horses to buy.
She turned onto her side and let the familiar sounds put her to sleep.