Chapter 2

The ride home took the better part of an hour, long enough for the afternoon heat to settle into something mean and personal, long enough for the silence behind him to become its own kind of weather. Coulter kept his eyes on the trail and his hands easy on the reins and did not say anything because he did not yet know what to say that wouldn’t come out wrong.

Emmie broke first. She usually did.

“Are you mad at us?”

“No.”

“You seem mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

Marie said, “You have the face you make when you’re mad but don’t want to say so.”

Coulter exhaled through his nose. “I have one face.”

“You have several,” Emmie said. “That’s the third one.”

He didn’t answer that. The trail curved south around a dry wash and the ranch came into view a half mile out — the house, the barn leaning slightly left the way it always had, the corral, the windmill turning slow in the afternoon air. Home. Such as it was.

He unsaddled the mare in silence and turned her into the corral and carried the supplies inside while the girls set the table without being asked, moving around the kitchen in the efficient quiet they’d developed over eighteen months of understanding that their father had a limited amount of words available on any given day and they should not waste them.

He fried salt pork. Heated the leftover beans. Cut cornbread from the pan on the stove. They sat down and ate and the only sounds were forks and the wind working at the eaves and somewhere outside one of the chickens making its feelings known about something.

Finally Emmie set down her fork. “We didn’t mean to embarrass you.”