She closed the ledger. Then we start tomorrow. The ranch hands took it better than Matteo had predicted and worse than Rosalie had hoped, which was about what she expected from a group of working men being told that the woman in the kitchen was now making decisions about what went on their plates. Coats grumbled. Two younger hands made jokes she was not supposed to hear.
Ellis, who had carried the soup out during the first bad day, told the others to settle down, which helped more than she would have given Ellis credit for two weeks earlier. The one who surprised her was a hand named Decker, broad and quiet, who had never said a word directly to her in the 5 weeks she'd been at Blackthornne. He appeared at the kitchen door on the third morning of the new system and stood there until she acknowledged him. Yes, she said. I wanted to ask, he said, about the beans.
She waited. My mother used to put something in them. Spice. I don't know what it was. Made them taste like he stopped.
I know it's not your job to cook what people want. What did it smell like? She asked. He thought about it. Like smoke and something sharp.
She turned to the spice shelf spare, but not empty. She had reorganized it 2 weeks ago. Cumin, she said, taking down the small tin and probably chili. Did she cook them long? All day, he said.
I can do that on Thursday when we have time for it. She set the tin on the counter. Anything else? He looked like a man who had prepared for a harder conversation. No, he said.
That's all. He left. She put the cumin back and thought about the particular economy of small gestures, how much they cost, how much they returned. Her mother had understood that a recipe book was not really a book of recipes. It was a record of every time a woman had used food to say something she didn't have the language for otherwise.
She thought about this more than she should have. Probably the storm broke on the eighth day. Not with fanfare, the wind simply went quiet sometime before dawn. And when Rosalie came downstairs, the kitchen windows showed a sky that was still dark but clear, stars visible for the first time in over a week. She stood at the window and looked at them for a moment with her arms crossed over her robe.
Feeling something ease in her chest that she hadn't realized had been clenched, she made the coffee. Gideon came down 10 minutes later. He looked at the clear window and then at her. Roads might be passable by tomorrow, he said. We need the flower first.
Everything else can wait a week, but the flower can't. He nodded. Mateo and I'll take the supply wagon to Harker as soon as the roads workable. I'll give you the list. I know you will.
He poured his coffee. He looked at it. It's too strong again. You always make it too strong. Then you should make it.
You always come down before I do. He looked at her over the cup. Something in his face was different in the morning light after 8 days of Vivalums. Like the storm had worn some layer of him thin. I like that you fix it, he said.
She took the pot and added the hot water from the basin. She kept near the stove for exactly this reason. The coffee went from mud to something you could actually drink. EMTT wants to go to Harker with you, she said. He won't ask you directly.
Gideon looked at the window. You think he should? I think he's been useful this winter and he knows it and he needs you to know it, too. She set the pot back, but that's your call, not mine. He was quiet.
This was not the quiet of dismissal. It was the quiet of a man sitting with something. He told me, Gideon said, that you said he had more sense than most of the adult men you'd known. I said that while dragging you back from a frozen ravine. Context matters.
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. She had seen that happen twice before, and both times it had done something to the morning she hadn't been prepared for. She went to start the porridge. He took EMTT on the supply run.
She watched them go from the kitchen window, the wagon moving down the track through the snow. EMTT sitting beside his father with his shoulders squared in the particular way of a boy who is working very hard not to look like he's trying to look like a man. She watched until the wagon was out of sight, and then she went back to work because there was always work, and work was what she knew how to do. Jaime spent the morning in the kitchen with her, which had become so standard that she'd stopped judicing the absence of it when it didn't happen. He was measuring the starter that morning, a task she had given him full responsibility for, and he was doing it with the focused gravity of a small person who understood that the sourdough starter's continued health was a real matter with real consequences.
It ate too much, he announced. She looked over. The croc was high fuller than it should be at this point in the morning feed cycle. You can see by the surface level and the smell. He leaned close and sniffed.
It smells too sharp, like when something's working too hard. She put her spoon down and came to look. He was right. The starter had been in a warmer spot in the kitchen since she'd moved it closer to the stove during the storm, and it was running faster than her schedule accounted for. "Move it to the shelf by the far wall," she said.