Harlan dismounted after a moment. He didn't like being made to speak downward to her. Ruth could tell herself it was kindness, or that he wanted her to see how reasonable he was. Both could be true. He stood with one hand on his horse's neck and studied her face.
“You haven't slept.”
“Some.”
“You look like your father when he tried to drive a lame mule to a wedding.”
She remembered the story. Her father had arrived two days late with a blistered heel and the mule riding in a borrowed cart. Harlan had told it at every dinner for a year after taking Ruth in, until she could laugh about her father without feeling disloyal.
“Mule had the right idea,” she said.
He smiled before he caught himself. The smile hurt worse than his anger.
Beyond him Asa and Wade were holding the horses at the western end. Benito had gone through the herd to help unload. The wagons were close enough that Ruth heard Teresa counting bundles and telling Rafael not to put the flour under Mateo's boot. Harlan seemed to hear none of it.
“Come home,” he said.
She looked at him.
“We'll forget this. I'll put the sixty in your name. The twelve hundred can stand as deposit when you've got it ready. You sell them honest, make your start, pay the rest as you can. It's what you came for.”
Her mouth had gone dry. It was what she came for, offered more generously than she had hoped. The lot was sound. With a year and good markets she could have a yard of her own, a clerk if she wanted one, a roof she didn't rent a night at a time. Lark's reins lay warm in her hand. She could ride home beside him before sunset.
“And them?”
Harlan glanced toward the wagons, annoyed at the interruption.
“We'll find sense. Carmela will listen when she's cooled down.”
“Luis and Inés?”
“They need work. You worked at their age.”
“I got to leave.”
“I let you leave.”
He said it without intending the wound. Ruth watched his face as he realized she had heard it differently.
“Don't pick at words.”
“What if you hadn't?”
“You didn't have people to feed. Accounts piled up. You'd learned something useful, and I trusted you to remember who taught it.”
Behind the horses Eva called for her mother. Carmela answered, breathless with work. Ruth looked toward the wagon, then back at Harlan.
“I wrote Mateo's axle against him. The one he told you was cracked.”
“Years ago.”
“Twenty-eight dollars.”
“You think one figure—”
“I wrote the coat twice. I signed at the bottom. You didn't make my hand do it.”
Harlan's eyes narrowed. “Then why are you accusing me?”
“I'm telling you why I can't come back.”
For a moment she couldn't hear the horses. She could see the desk, the blotter, her younger hand making the line clean. She had liked being trusted with money that wasn't hers. Liked being the clever girl he praised. A coat, an axle, a doctor's charge: small things to carry into the future when someone else carried the weight.
“You were a child,” he said.
“You said I was good at it.”
“You were.”
He reached for her wrist. It was such an old gesture that she nearly let him take it. His fingers closed, warm and familiar, below the place where the rope had burned her palm.
“Listen to me. You don't owe these people your life. You've got a right to make something of yourself. I'm giving you the chance.”
Ruth looked at his hand. He had held her on a horse when she was feverish, carried her from a shed when a beam fell, sat beside her after a letter came telling her there was no money left from her father's things. None of that had been false. She wished it had been. She could have pulled away more easily from a stranger.
“I loved you,” she said.
His face softened. “I know you did, honey.”
The past tense hadn't reached him.
She opened her hand and moved it through his grip, the way he had taught her to slip a rope that might tighten. He let go, offended rather than overpowered.
“I'm going with them.”
“You won't have a dollar.”
“I know.”
“You'll come to me when they wear you out. When there isn't work. When that mare goes lame and there's no money to buy another.”
Ruth couldn't promise herself that she wouldn't be hungry again. That was the worst of it. She could see herself standing outside a hired room, calculating one more meal, wanting the old kitchen so badly she might turn toward the road home before she knew she had moved.
“Maybe I'll want to,” she said.
Harlan looked relieved.
“But you won't wait for them to listen,” she went on. “You'll take the horses and still try to take Carmela and the children. I need you to hear me. They aren't coming back.”
His face shut.
For a while neither spoke. A harness chain rattled. The rear wagon creaked under a shifted load. Ruth could smell Lark's sweat and the old tobacco in Harlan's coat.
He put on his gloves, finger by finger.
“Asa.”
The foreman looked over from the western approach.
“Get those people off the wagons. We'll sort this at home.”
Asa hesitated. It was only a pause to take in the ground, but Ruth used it.
She backed Lark toward the herd and lifted her voice.
“Carmela. Now.”
Harlan caught his horse's reins. Ruth turned before she could see whether his hand shook.