Iris said I asked for supper for my boy. You got both? Reuben said whether you asked or not. Iris and Tom took the small back room off the kitchen. Little more than a closet with a cot and a window, but it was dry and warm from the stove wall it shared.
And after two days of walking muddy roads, it felt like a mansion to a boy who'd been sleeping in ditches and barns. Tom, meanwhile, had attached himself to Lucius within a day, trailing the big man everywhere he went, asking a hundred questions about horses and rope and cattle that Lucius answered with endless, gentle patience, crouching down to the boy's height, so as not to loom over him, the way his size loomed over grown men. He's got no father to ask these things of," Iris said to Lucius one evening, watching Tom help, or attempt to help coil a lariat twice his size, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration. "I hope he isn't a bother to you." "Ain't no bother," Lucius said. "Had a little brother back in Missouri about his age.
Miss him something fierce. Ain't seen him in six years. This one's good company, and he asks smarter questions than half the grown men on this outfit. Reuben, for his part, watched all of it from a careful distance. The way a man watches something he's afraid to want too openly.
He noticed Iris's hands chapped and red from cold water and endless work, and said nothing about it, though it troubled him more than he'd admit even to himself. He noticed his own temper, which had been a live wire since the horse wreck ruined his shoulder, growing quieter around her without his quite meaning it too. The sharp words dying in his throat before they reached the air whenever she was in the room. He told himself it was gratitude for the cooking. He told himself that for longer than was strictly honest, and knew it even as he told himself.
Iris noticed the way Reuben favored his right shoulder, the careful stiffness in how he swung into the saddle, the ws he tried to hide when he lifted anything heavy overhead. "That shoulders never healed right," she said one evening. Not a question. "It's fine. It is not fine.
My mother made a linament for my father's bad knee that would have raised the dead. Sit down and let me look at it before you tear something worse and can't work the ranch at all. Reuben, against every instinct toward stubborn pride, sat. The linament camper and mustard and something else Iris wouldn't name, brewed on the back of the stove in an old tin cup, burned like fire going on, and eased the ache like nothing the doctor in town had ever prescribed. Within a week, Reuben's temper, which had snapped at hands over nothing all winter, eased along with the shoulder, and the men noticed it before he did, exchanging quiet, relieved looks at supper, when he passed the salt without biting anyone's head off first.