I keep them wrapped." He looked at her the way a man looks at something he has already decided he does not want to be impressed by. "Kitchen's through the back. You'll meet the boys at supper." "What time is supper?"
"When it's ready." She held his gaze for exactly 2 seconds. "Then I'll need to know what you have." He jerked his chin toward the house and walked inside without another word. The kitchen was a disaster.
Not a filthy disaster. She could see someone had scrubbed the floor within the last few days, an act of optimism rather than achievement, but a disaster of disorganization, of a household that had been running on the efforts of six boys who had been doing their best without knowing how. There was salt in the sugar tin. The flour sack had a mouse hole in its lower corner that had been folded over and tied with twine. The iron stove was good, heavy and well made, but the flue needed clearing.
She could smell it. She found a root cellar through a low door behind the stove, and what she found there was better than she expected. Potatoes, dried beans, a ham hock, three hanging onions, a jar of rendered lard, and enough cornmeal to work with. She tied on her apron and cleared the flue first. By the time the six sons came through the door at dusk, she had a pot of bean soup on the stove with the ham hock and two of the onions, a skillet of cornbread cooling on the sideboard, and a small pot of canned tomatoes she had found behind a broken chair in the cellar, seasoned with the salt she had moved to its correct tin.
The kitchen smelled of real cooking for the first time in what she suspected was a very long time. The boys came in youngest to oldest, filed by some internal instinct of order. The youngest, she would learn later, was called Emmett. And he stopped dead in the doorway and said, "It smells like Ma used to make." The oldest one, Wyatt, 19 and already carrying himself like a man who had been forced to grow up faster than was fair, put a hand on Emmett's shoulder and steered him to his seat without meeting Nora's eyes.
Eli Callaway came in last. He looked at the table. He looked at the stove. He sat down. She served them and stood at the counter while they ate because there was no place set for her and she had not asked for one.
Emmett ate two bowls of soup and said, "Thank you." Three times. The two middle boys, she thought their names were Cal and Jesse by the way the others spoke to them, had a brief argument over the last piece of cornbread that was settled by Wyatt splitting it down the middle with a knife without being asked to referee. The father ate in silence and did not look at her again until the meal was cleared. "That cellar's been there since my wife's time," he said.
"Nobody knew what was in it." "You had more than you thought," she said. He stood and carried his own bowl to the basin. He did not say whether the food was good. He did not say anything else.
He walked out. Wyatt lingered after his brothers had gone. He was washing his bowl at the basin without being told, which said something about him. "He's not—" the boy started. "You don't need to explain your father to me," Nora said.