Its own thing. I'd expect nothing different, he said. And if I chose Cheyenne instead, this conversation didn't happen. That's also fine, he said. But something in his voice was doing something he wasn't controlling fully.
And she heard it, and she filed it, where she filed most things about Gideon Rusk, somewhere she was still deciding what to do with. She walked to the south window and looked out at the ranch road. A wagon could stop there without blocking the track. A sign hung above the door would be visible from a good distance in either direction. I'll think about it, she said.
I know, he said. That's all I'm asking. They walked back to the house in the cold morning light and she made lunch and she had kept thinking about it for the next week with a focused persistence that began to feel less like deliberation and more like something she had already decided. and was waiting to catch up to. The letter from Cheyenne arrived the second week of February. Harker had held it for them since the roads opened, and Gideon brought it back from the supply run along with the flour and the oil and the coffee, and he put it on the kitchen table beside her ledger without a word, and went out to help unload the wagon.
It was a proper letter on Grand Hotel's stationery with a new name in the header where Parishes had been. She read it at the kitchen table while the bread was in the oven. The the new manager wrote clearly and without flattery. He stated that her name had been cleared following Dale Coover's confession, that the hotel wished to make restitution for the damage done to her reputation, and that her former position was available with a salary increase, and a written employment contract, which Parish had never offered, a written contract that was new. She read the letter twice.
Then she sat it down and looked out the kitchen window at the stone building, visible through the bare trees beside the ranch road, its good chimney against the February sky. Jaime appeared in the kitchen door. He looked at the letter. He looked at her face. He did not ask.
She looked at him. "Do you know what a written contract is? " "No," he said. "It's a document that says what both parties agree to, what they'll do, what they'll get for it, signed by both of them. " She folded the letter. It means if one person breaks their word, the other person has proof. He thought about this like a handshake but on paper.
Exactly like that. He came into the kitchen and went to check on the starter which was his morning task even on days she hadn't asked him to do it. He fed it and stirred it and moved it to its proper spot and stood back. If you went to Cheyenne, he said to the starter rather than to her, could you take the starter with you? She looked at the croc part of it.
Yes. A starter lives as long as you feed it. You could keep the rest here and it would keep going. So there'd be two of them. That's how starters work, she said.
You give part of it away and it doesn't diminish what's left. Both parts keep living. He was quiet. Jaime, she said. He looked at her.
Whatever I decide, it's not going to be because I don't want to be here, she said. I want you to understand that his face did something complicated and then smoothed back out. He was learning to manage his expressions from his father, she thought, except he hadn't gotten fully proficient at it yet, which meant she could still see everything. Okay, he said. She made the lunch.
The afternoon, Gideon finally said the thing he'd been not saying for weeks arrived without announcement, the way most important things do in the middle of an ordinary task, with poor timing and no preparation on either side. She had been in the study going over the February accounts with him, a task she had taken on sometime in January without either of them formally deciding she should because because the household financial management and the food management were connected to separate cleanly. And Gideon's system for tracking expenditures was, to put it charitably, impressionistic. She had developed a better ledger. He had accepted this with the same matter-of-act practicality he'd accepted most of her organizational improvements as if she had identified a loose board and fixed it and the only reasonable response was to acknowledge the floor was more stable now.
She was cross-referencing the feed costs against the cattle count for the spring market calculation. He said without looking up from his own portion of the accounts the Cheyenne letter she kept writing. What about it? You haven't said what you're going to do. I haven't decided.
It's been 2 weeks. I'm aware. She finished the column. Decisions like this take the time they take. He was quiet for a moment.
Outside the study window, the February afternoon was going gray and cold. The short light of mid-inter already pulling toward dusk at 4:00. I want to tell you something, he said. She put her pen down. He looked at the accounts ledger in front of him as if it had become very interesting.
His hands were flat on the desk. I am not good at this, he said. I want to say that first, so you understand what you're hearing when I say it. All right, she said. When Clara died, he said her name, his wife's name, for the first time since Rosalie had arrived.