Then use it. She banked the fire for the night. She moved through the kitchen, turning things off and down and covered in the specific way she had developed over 3 weeks of learning how this particular stove behaved overnight. She was at the kitchen door when he said her name. She stopped.
The men, he said. They'll back you. I'll see to it. He paused. Whatever they think they know about Cheyenne, none of them think you're a thief anymore.
Haven't for a while. She didn't turn around. What changed their minds? You, he said. Just you being exactly what you are.
She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and she looked at the dark entry hall and she did not say something for a moment because there was a particular kind of thing some words did to the inside of a chest. A warmth that had nothing to do with stoves and she had some rules about that warmth and how much of it she was allowed to acknowledge that. Get some sleep, Gideon, she said. She went upstairs. She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and listened to the storm working against the house from all sides, finding every gap, every weakness in the insulation, every place where the cold could press through if it tried hard enough.
The house held. She thought about the numbers in the ledger. She thought about February, which was still 6 weeks away and would be worse than this. She thought about the ration plan and whether she'd calculated the dried bean yield correctly and whether she'd accounted properly for the days when the men would need more calories because they were working in conditions that took twice as much out of a body. She did not think about what Gideon had said.
She tried not to. She was still trying when she fell asleep, which was later than she intended, and the wind outside went on doing what the wind in Wyoming does in December, which is whatever it wants. The next morning, she came downstairs before first light and found Gideon already in the kitchen. He had made the coffee. It was terrible coffee, far too strong, the grounds not properly settled, but he had made it, and he had clearly done so with intention, and he was sitting at the table with his hands wrapped around a cup, and he looked up when she came in.
She looked at the coffee pot. She looked at him. She poured herself a cup. She sat down across from him. They drank the terrible coffee in the early dark of the kitchen without saying anything.
And outside storm was still going. But inside the stove was warm and the sourdough starter on the counter was already showing its morning bubbles, alive and reliable and doing exactly what she had taught it to do. And for the first time since Cheyenne Rosley Hartwell sat in a kitchen and did not feel like she was surviving. She felt like she was somewhere. She wasn't ready to call it anything more than that, but it was something.
The terrible coffee became a habit. Not something either of them decided, not something discussed. It simply happened the way certain things happen in houses where people are living too close together under difficult circumstances gradually and then all at once. And then it was just the way mornings worked at Blackthornne Ranch. Gideon made the coffee.
Rosalie fixed it. They sat in the early dark of the kitchen before the boys came down and before the ranch hands needed anything, and they drank it without talking much, which suited the both of them. Two people who had spent considerable portions of their lives learning that silence was safer than conversation, sitting in the same silence for different reasons. She did not call it anything. She was careful about that.
What she could not be careful about was the ration system, which required her to be considerably more present in the workings of the ranch than she had been before the storm. The storm had been going 6 days when she finally sat down with Matteo and Roy and Gideon at the kitchen table with her ledger open and laid out what the next 8 weeks were going to look like. She had colorcoded it, not with ink she didn't have, but by drawing lines, solid lines for what they had, broken lines for what they'd need, dotted lines for the margin she was trying to maintain between adequate and desperate. She had calculated portions by weight, and by the caloric demands of outdoor labor in cold weather, which she knew from her mother's time cooking for a lumber camp, not from anything she'd advertised when she took this position. Gideon looked at the ledger the way he'd looked at it the night she came back from the ravine with the particular attention of a man who was re-calibrating something.
Roy looked at it and whistled low. "You did this in a day? " Roy asked. "2o days? " she said, while also cooking. Mateo studied the column for the ranch hands. "The men are not going to love the breakfast reduction. " "I know," she said.
"The breakfast reduction is because they need more at midday when they're working and less in the morning when they haven't started yet. It's not a cut, it's a redistribution. The total calories stay the same. They'll still complain, Matteo said. They can complain to me, she said.
You tell them the distribution comes from the food manager and Gideon's backing it. That's all they need to know. Matteo looked at Gideon. Gideon looked at her. Food manager, he said.
That's what I am now, she said. Unless you want someone else doing this. A pause. Not long. No, he said.