By his second week in Evelyn's care, he had established a relationship with her that operated on his own clear terms. He wanted to be near her almost constantly. He objected loudly when she put him down, and he had developed the habit of grabbing the front of her dress whenever she picked him up, and holding on with a grip that was, for 8 months old, surprisingly firm. She didn't mind.
She hadn't expected to not mind. But she didn't. The ranch work organized itself around Caleb's rhythms, which meant early mornings in the kitchen while he slept, midday work when he napped after his lunch, and the late day tasks squeezed between the afternoon feeding and the beginning of dinner. She was busy in a way that she'd almost forgotten she could be.
Not the grinding, purposeless busy of a woman doing piecework in Cheyenne with nothing to show for it, but the kind of busy that had weight that added up to something at the end of each day. The kitchen was her first real project. Not because it was the most important thing, but because it was the foundation of everything else. A kitchen that worked meant the men ate, meant Nathan ate, meant there was warmth in the house from the stove fire, and something that smelled like food instead of absence.
She spent the better part of the second week getting it fully functional, restocking the larder by going through what remained and making a careful list, fixing the draft problem in the stove flue that had been making the fire burn unevenly, and reorganizing the shelves so that things were where they should be and therefore findable, which sounds obvious and is in fact something that is never obvious until it isn't true. She sent the list with Dolan when he went into Grace Falls for supplies because Dolan was the one Nathan most often sent on errands and because sending it with Briggs felt like pushing her luck. Dolan came back with most of what was on the list and a look on his face that suggested he wasn't entirely sure what peppercorns were for, but had bought them because she'd written them down. "Thank you," she told him.
He shrugged, but he wasn't cold the way he'd been the first week, and she counted that. The more serious problem, the one she'd been circling for 2 weeks before she said anything, was the account books. She hadn't been looking for them. She'd been cleaning the desk in the front room, which was buried under a drift of papers that had been accumulating since roughly March based on the date she could read.
And she'd started organizing them simply because a buried desk was a desk nobody could use. And that was when she realized that what she was looking at was not just a pile of unsorted correspondence. There were invoices in there that hadn't been responded to. There were supply accounts that hadn't been reconciled in months.
There was a letter from a bank in Laramie dated 6 weeks ago that had been opened and then set down and apparently not thought about since. She stacked everything carefully. She didn't read the bank letter, but she couldn't unsee that she'd seen it. She told Nathan about the desk that evening after Caleb was down.
I was cleaning the front room. She said, "The desk needed organizing. I've stacked everything, but I didn't read your correspondence. I want you to know that."
Nathan was at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee he'd been nursing since dinner. He looked up at her, and there was something in his expression that she couldn't quite read, not quite embarrassed, not quite resigned. Something in between that had more layers to it than either of those things. "I know it's behind," he said.
"I'm not criticizing. I'm telling you so you know where things are." She sat down across from him. She'd learned that standing when she talked to Nathan put him in a position of being looked down at, which made him defensive in a way that wasn't useful.
She'd figured that out in the first week. Is there someone who helps you with the accounts? A bookkeeper. Jim Farley used to do it.