"Cooler there. It'll slow down. " He moved it carefully, both hands, treating the croc like something that needed steady handling. "Jamie," she said. He looked at her. You have good instincts for this.
He looked back at the croc on the far shelf. She couldn't see his face clearly. Mama used to make bread, he said. She kept her voice even. I know, not the same kind.
Hers was different. Most people's bread is different, she said. That's how it should be. He was quiet for a moment. Do you think she'd mind that I'm learning from you?
The question landed differently than she expected, and she took a second to answer it properly. I think she said that someone who made bread for her family would want her son to know how. He seemed to consider this. Then he went back to the starter on the far shelf and stood looking at it with his hands in his pockets. She went back to the porridge.
Gideon and Emmett came back from Harker in the late afternoon with the wagon loaded and EMTT talking more sem than she had ever heard him talk, describing the road conditions and the state of the supply stock and something Harker had said about a cattleman in Casper that had apparently struck EMTT as significant. Gideon listened to him with the particular quality of attention a father gives a child when the child doesn't know they're being watched and the father is trying to memorize something. She unloaded the wagon with Matteo while they were still coming up the track because the flower needed to be inside before the temperature dropped again at nightfall. Gideon appeared beside her when she was carrying the second flower sack. "Let me," he said.
"I have it," Rosalie. She handed him the sack, not because she couldn't carry it. Because arguing about flower sacks in the cold with a man who had a bandaged head and cracked knuckles and had ridden a supply wagon all day seemed like the wrong use of everyone's time. He carried the sack inside. She followed with the canned goods.
In the pantry, stacking the new provisions beside the carefully managed existing stores. She felt for the first time since before the storm that the numbers were going to be all right. Not comfortable, not easy, but all right. Parker said something, Gideon said from behind her. She kept stacking.
What did he say? He had a man come through 3 days ago. Traveling merchant. Said he'd come from Cheyenne. She stopped stacking.
He knew your name. Gideon said he'd heard about you from someone at the Grand Hotel. The pantry was very quiet. She turned around. Said Dale Coover got caught stealing from a hotel in Laram.
Gideon said, "Same scheme he ran on you. Apparently, he'd been doing it at two hotels before the Grand, and someone finally caught him with proof this time, he confessed. He paused. The man told Harker that word was getting around that what happened to you at the Grand wasn't what Parish said it was. She stood in the pantry with a jar of canned tomatoes in each hand, and she looked at Gideon, and she did not say anything.
"I thought you should know," he said. She set the jars on the shelf. She turned back to the remaining provisions and started stacking again methodically without hurrying. Rosaly, I heard you, she said. It's good news.
I know it is. Then why? Because knowing the truth was true doesn't change the 5 weeks before anyone sensome said it out loud, she said. And it doesn't change what Parish did or Mrs. Briggs or the men in Harker's store or Bellard.
She stacked another jar. The truth being confirmed is good. The truth having needed confirming is something else. He was quiet behind her. She finished stacking.
She straightened. I appreciate you telling me. There's more. He said, she turned. Harker said the Grand Hotel's new manager, Parish, is gone.
Apparently, some falling out with the owner. The new manager is trying to locate you to offer reinstatement with back wages. The pantry was so quiet she could hear the house settling around them. The position in Cheyenne, she said with better wages than before, Harker said. She looked at him.
He was looking at her with an expression she had not seen on his face before. Not the evaluating look, not the morning coffee look, not the look he got when he was handling something difficult, something more unguarded than any of those. Something she was not prepared for. I see, she said. You'd have your reputation back, he said. a good position references.
Everything that was taken from you. Yes, she said. I wanted you to know that it exists, he said. Before he stopped. Before what?
He looked at the shelf behind her at the carefully organized provisions. She had spent the morning planning and the afternoon stacking. Before spring makes leaving harder, he said. She was not going to read anything into that. She had a set of very clear rules.
Thank you for telling me, she said. I'll think about it. She went back to the kitchen. She thought about it through supper preparation and through supper itself, eating at the counter the way she always did, watching the table where Gideon and EMTT and Jaime ate with the easy quiet of people who had been through something together and were still still in it and knew it. She thought about Cheyenne, the Grand Hotel's kitchen, a position that was hers again, the one she'd built, the one Parish had taken.
She thought about what it would mean to leave. She told herself not to think about what it would mean to leave. She thought about it anyway. The week after the storm broke had its own particular character, a forced reconstruction. The ranch pulling itself back from the edge that the 8 days of weather had pushed it to.