Not when you claim it.
When it claims you.
Maisie asks the question on Friday evening.
We're on the front porch after dinner, just the two of us, the particular end of week quiet that has become something I look forward to without meaning to. She's in the chair beside mine with her boots off and her feet tucked under her, eating the last of a cookie she talked Jolene into sending home with us.
We're watching the ranch go gold in the evening light with the settled contentment of a child who is exactly where she wants to be.
Rowdy is asleep across my feet which makes moving inconvenient and neither of us has done anything about it.
We've been sitting like this for twenty minutes. Maisie is capable of extended comfortable silence when something is occupying her mind, which I know because she gets it from me, and I'velearned to wait it out rather than fill it. Whatever she's working through she'll get there in her own time.
She gets there.
"Dad."
"Mm."
She picks at the edge of her cookie. "Are we staying?"
I look at her. "What do you mean?"
"Here." She gestures with the cookie at the ranch, the yard, the hill line, the whole of Silver Mesa spread out in front of us in the evening. "At Silver Mesa. Are we staying forever or is this a for now thing?"
I'm quiet for a moment.
It's a fair question. A reasonable question. The kind of question that deserves a real answer rather than a comfortable deflection, which is what a lesser version of me would have reached for six months ago.
I think about the secondary line diagram on my passenger seat. Earl's nickname delivered to my face. Remy's admission at the fence. Silas saying you're in with that small careful smile.
Laney's cabin light on in the early morning.
"Forever," I say. "If that's okay with you."
Maisie looks at me for a second with those serious eyes. Then she looks back out at the ranch. "It's okay with me," she says, with the gravity of someone ratifying an important agreement.
We sit with that for a moment.
"I like it here better than San Francisco," she says. "In San Francisco everything smelled like coffee and car exhaust. Here it smells like horses and grass and sometimes Rowdy when he gets into something."
"Rowdy gets into a lot of things."
"He got into the compost bin again this morning." She says it without particular concern. "I didn't tell you because you were busy."
I look at Rowdy asleep across my feet with the peaceful expression of an animal with no conscience whatsoever. "I wondered what that smell was."
"I hosed him off." She finishes her cookie. "Mostly."
I look at my dog.
My dog looks like he is having a wonderful dream about whatever he got into in the compost bin.
Maisie leans her head against my arm the way she used to do when she was smaller, comfortable, easy, and looks out at the ranch in the fading light. "I think Laney likes it when we're here," she says. Careful. Feeling out the edges of something.
"I think so too," I say. Just as careful.
"She smiles more than she used to." Maisie picks at a loose thread on her sock. "Remy told me she didn't used to smile as much. Before we came."
