What Once We Loved by Jane Kirkpatrick

don't go pumping on that handle now. I told you I loved you when I married you. That hasn't changed. Don't need to keep repeating a thing. Only seven by nines need things repeated.”
    Matthew'd wondered about that phrase his pa used. He'd even asked him once, within his mothers hearing, what it meant.
    “Huh?” his pa said. “How would I know?”
    “Your pa don't worry over origins of things. Nor what their impactmight be,” Lura told him and then answered the question her husband couldn't. “Used to be the size of common windows, a seven by nine, and people who're common—”
    “Don't you be filling your head with words and such,” his pa had countered, pointing with that pipe. “There are no solutions in reading. Experience, that's what you got to learn from. It don't matter what that term meant once. Enough said.”
    “She was just saying, Pa.”
    His father had sat right up in the chair. “Don't you go back-talking to your pa now, Son. Don't worry over women none either. They'll come along when they're told. It's the way it was meant to be. It's the way it is.” His pa had sat back in the leather chair. “You put your concentration on cattle and land, Son. That's how you'll take care of your ma. And how you'll find yourself a woman. You don't worry about this ‘touching ‘em' every day with sweet words and all. You give her land, and she'll come to you like a bear to honey.”
    His mother had snorted. “Ask your pa if that's how I came to him.” His father had lifted an eyebrow. “I'll answer that one, too. Your pa came to me, my being an only child. And my father having land with a house on it with windows larger than seven by nine. Now who's talking honeyed words,” she'd said and slammed the long-handled spider to the stove.
    Funny he should think ofthat day while he was dealing with Ruth. He guessed he wanted to say and do what would be a comfort to her— he didn't want to agitate her. He wanted to be more like his grandfather, using loving words every day, even if his pa thought it wasted effort.
    His ma seemed to be enjoying the readying. He was glad she'd be with him and Mariah instead of sharpening knives for butchers and whatnot, taking that little cart around with things from the Wilsons Mercantile to sell to folks up in the ravines. He didn't think that was safe, a woman going alone like that. “Pa said I was to look after you,” he'd told her when he arrived in Shasta City.
    “He couldn't look after himself,” she said and sniffed.
    “Ma!”
    “Its true. Oh, he loved me. I know he did, in his way. But I cooked and cleaned and mended and ran for him, and he mostly told me I was nothing but shucks. Well, I'm more than that. And so is Mariah, and so are you. I'm proud you took the cattle on ahead. Proud you tended Ruth Martins horses all that time. But while you were growing up, we were doing things to tend to others and ourselves, too, back there on the trail. We were growing up too.”
    “Mariah looks a little worse for wear,” he said under his breath.
    “Mariah does? She's doing fine. She's a big help to me.”
    “She ought to be in school, Ma. You don't want her ending up as some…seven by nine.”
    His mother hadn't responded, but she'd thumbed her eyes , quick like. He figured he'd hit a nerve.
    His little sister, Mariah, had changed. Taller, prettier, a good rider. He guessed it was all that time with Ruth's horses. But she wore a sadder face somehow. Joe Pepin, the wrangler who had come all the way from New York with them, had commented on that too, how Matt's little pipsqueak sister had “grown the eyes of a lonesome dog.” It wasn't exacdy how Matthew would describe it, but he knew just what Joe meant.
    Maybe his ma hadn't been available to her like she should have been this past year after his pa's death. Maybe his ma's push for business was her way of numbing the pain of it, and Mariah had paid the price. He had to step over the fact that his mother had worked in a