By six o'clock the October light had drained out of the west windows, and Wade Hollister had switched on the green-shaded lamp at the rolltop desk in the corner of the family room. The desk had been his father's, and his grandfather's before that, and its pigeonholes were still stuffed with the same kinds of paper they had always held: feed tickets, vet bills, brand inspection slips, the yellow carbon copies from the sale barn in Billings. He had come home a day and a half early from the fall run of calf sales, sore in the lower back from four hundred miles of two-lane, and instead of resting he had sat down with the month's invoices because that was what the end of a trip meant to him. You went away and sold things, and then you came home and found out what it had cost you to be gone.
The room was the warmest in the house. The floors were wide fir planks that his great-grandfather had milled from timber on the Snowy Mountains side of the place, scarred by a century of boots and dog claws and dropped tools, and the stone fireplace at the far end had been laid by a man nobody remembered from rock nobody had to go far to find. Claire had a fire going in it now, small and orderly, cottonwood and a little pine. The leather sofa and the two armchairs had the dull brown shine of saddles. On the walls hung the photographs that every ranch house in Fergus County seemed to have, the same photographs in different frames: men on horseback squinting at the camera in front of a branding fire, a black-and-white of a sod-roofed cabin, a calf crop in a corral in 1958, Wade himself at nine years old on a sorrel gelding named Biscuit. By the back door, on the bench where everyone sat to pull off boots, lay a loose pile of work gloves, stiff and curled into the shapes of the hands that had worn them.
Claire sat cross-legged on the hearth rug with the mail fanned out around her, sorting it into the piles she always made: bills, catalogues, church, things that needed Wade. She had her dark hair tied back the way she wore it for chores, and the firelight caught the rust color of her henley and made it look nearly red. She had said hello when he came in, and kissed him, and asked how the sale went, and he had told her the steers brought what he'd hoped and the heifers brought a little less, and she had nodded and said that was about what she figured. It had been a good, ordinary homecoming. He would remember that later, how ordinary it had been for the first twenty minutes.
He heard June on the stairs before he saw her, because June did not know how to come down stairs quietly. She came down them the way a calf comes down a loading chute, all knees and urgency, and then she was standing in the doorway of the family room with her chin up and her arms held a little away from her sides.
She was wearing a man's flannel shirt. It was red and black buffalo check, faded at the elbows, and it hung on her to below her knees, so that it looked less like a shirt than a kind of robe. The sleeves had been rolled up into thick doughnuts at her wrists and still swallowed her hands. Her auburn braids hung down over the collar. In her left hand, clutched against her chest like a trophy, she held a pair of men's leather work gloves, the good kind, elk-skin, the palms just starting to darken with use.
She took a breath that lifted her whole small body.
"Dad, I'm ready to work the ranch."
Wade turned all the way around in the desk chair. He could not help the smile; it came up out of somewhere below his ribs. She had freckles across her nose like somebody had flicked a paintbrush at her, and her hazel eyes were so serious that he had to bite the inside of his cheek.