And here she paused in a way that told Rosalie she was not going to like what came next. There is a placement outside of town. Considerably outside of town. Red Hollow Wyoming. A ranching settlement.
A widowed cattleman named Gideon Rusk was looking for someone to cook and keep house through the winter. Room and board provided modest wages. He had according to Mrs. Farwell's notes already turned down two applicants. What was wrong with them?
Rosalie asked. Mrs. Farwell looked at her over the spectacles again. He didn't say, "These frontier men rarely explain themselves. " Rosalie had heard of Red Hollow, the way you hear of places people say they're from but never go back to. Isolated, cold, the kind of place where winter lasted at 5 months, and the nearest town with a proper store was a day's ride.
She asked how much the wages were. Mrs. Farwell told her it was not much, but it was something, and something was the only thing standing between Rosalie Hartwell and nothing. She took the placement. The wagon ride to Red Hollow took most of a long December day, and by the time the driver dropped her at the gate of Blackthorn Ranch, with her one battered suitcase, and in her mother's recipe book tucked inside her coat, the sun was already dropping toward the horizon, and the cold had moved from uncomfortable to mean.
The ranch looked large. She hadn't expected that. A main house, two barns, outuildings, a bunk house, all of it weathered and functional the way working places are, without any of the prettiness people add when they have time for it. Cattle she could hear but not see. The smell of hay and manure and woodmoke.
She stood at the gate for a long moment because no one came out. Then she picked up her suitcase and walked to the front door and knocked. Nothing. She knocked again harder. The door opened.
Gideon Rusk was not what she had imagined from Mrs. Farwell's brief description. She had imagined someone rough hune, perhaps loud, perhaps the kind of man who treated hired help the way he treated livestock. What she got instead was a tall, solidly built man of about 38 with a weathered face, and very dark eyes that assessed her the way you'd assess a fence for weak points, quickly, systematically, without warmth or hostility, just evaluation. He looked at her suitcase.
He looked at her face. "You're the cook," he said. It wasn't a question, so she didn't treat it like one. Rosalie Hartwell, Mrs. Farwells in Agency Cheyenne.
He stepped back from the door. Not exactly an invitation, but not a refusal either. She walked in. The house was large enough that it should have felt warmer than it did. The entry was dark.
The lamp on the wall turned low. Through a doorway, she could see the kitchen. She could see the pantry door from where she stood, hanging slightly open. Her cook's eye went there automatically, the way a carpenter looks at joints. What she could see from the entry already told her something she was not going to say out loud on her first 30 seconds in the house.
Gideon Rusk crossed his arms and looked at her with that same flat assessing look. I'll tell you how this works, he said. All right. You cook three meals a day for me and and eight ranch hands. Sometimes fewer, sometimes more.
You keep the house. You look after my boys when they're not in school, which most days because the school's been closed since October. You handle the kitchen stores. He paused. I don't need conversation.
I don't need someone trying to fix things that aren't broke. I've had enough of that. Rosalie nodded. What happened to the last cook? Something shifted in his face.
Not much, but enough. She left before winter, and the one before her, he was quiet for a beat. "Are you going to be asking a lot of questions? " "Just the ones that seem relevant," she said. He held her gaze for a moment, and she held his right back, which he seemed to neither expect nor know what to do with. "Your room's upstairs," he said finally.
"Second door on the left. Supper needs to be on the table by 6. " He reached for his hat, where it hung beside the door. The boys are in the front room. He was gone before she could answer. She heard the door close and then his boots on the steps outside and then nothing.
Rosalie stood in the entry of Blackthornne Ranch with her suitcase in her hand and the cold working through the walls and something in her chest that she couldn't quite name. Not quite despair, not quite hope. She went to the kitchen first. The pantry was worse than she'd thought from the entry. Not bare, but thin. worryingly thin for December on a working ranch that needed to feed 10 people through a Wyoming winter.
Half a sack of flour, three pounds of dried beans, some cornmeal, bacon ends, probably 4 lb, four jars of preserved tomatoes, two jars of apple preserves, old enough that the lids had gone concave, a salt block, dried onions, the cheap kind that had lost most of their smell. She stood in the pantry doorway and did the math in her head. The math did not come out well. She went to find the boys. Most of its windows were dark.
They were in the front room the way Gideon had said, but the word in did all the work because neither of them was doing much else. The older one, EMTT, she'd been told, 11 years old, was sitting near the window with a book held open in his hands. But he wasn't reading it. He was watching her. The younger one, Jaime, was 8 and sitting on the floor beside a cold fireplace, pushing a wooden block around the floorboards in a path that went nowhere in particular.