She had not had that before. She had had survival. She had had positions and rooms and borrowed spaces. She had not had a place that was hers to build. "Ask me again," she said.
He looked at her. "What you ask me in the study," she said. "Ask me again. " He held her gaze. "Will you marry me, Rosalie? " "Yes," she said. "On the condition that the building is mine.
The business is mine. " "My name is on whatever we put up above the door. " "Hartwell," he said without hesitation. whatever name you want and I'll have a written contract, she said, for the building. Not because I don't trust you, because I've learned that written things don't depend on the goodwill of the person who made the promise. He looked at her with something in his face that was not quite a smile and not quite pain, and was probably some of both. I'll have Harker draw it up. I'll draft it, she said.
Harker can witness it. This time he did smile fully, which she had not seen before, and it was a different thing on his face than she expected younger, and less guarded and considerably more difficult to look at without doing something she hadn't prepared for. "All right," he said. She turned back to the washwater. "The roof repair needs to start this week before the next weather comes. " "I know, and Roy needs to look at the chimney housing before we put any fire near it.
I've already talked to him. " Good. She washed the next bowl. Breakfast was adequate this morning, but the bunk house stove isn't going to manage the bread properly. I'll need to use the ranch house parlor stove for baking until the kitchen is repaired. Whatever you need, he said.
Go get your men started on the roof, she said. I'll have lunch ready at noon. She heard him go. She heard the bunk house door. She stood its windows.
She stood at the wash basin with her hands in the cooling water and she looked at the wall in front of her at the rough planks of the bunk house and she let herself feel what she was feeling for about 45 seconds. Then she finished the dishes. Spring came the way it always does in Wyoming grudgingly. In fits and starts, two warm days followed by a week of cold, the snow retreating and then reconsidering. The kitchen was repaired by mid-March with Royy's masonry work on the chimney better than what had been there before, which Roy pointed out with some frequency over the following weeks.
The roof was solid. The north counter was rebuilt from new timber, and it was better than the old one, wider and smoother, easier to work. The sourdough starter was alive and and thriving in its croc on the south counter. She and Gideon married in late March at the ranch with Matteo and Roy and the ranch hands present and Harker who had ridden out from Red Hollow because Harker liked to be present for things and also because she had asked him to witness the contract for the stone building which they signed the same afternoon. It was not a romantic occasion which suited both of them.
It was an occasion of intention. EMTT shook her hand afterward which she had expected. What she had not expected was that he then said quietly in the particular tone it used when he had been thinking about something for a long time and was finally committing to saying it. "I'm glad you didn't leave. " "I know," she said. "Me, too. " He went back to help Mateo with something involving a fence, and she watched him go and thought that 11 years old was both very young and in certain boys who had been through certain winters, not young at all.
Jaime gave her a drawing. He had done it on the back of a flower sack, his preferred medium with the charcoal stick she kept replenishing for him. It was the stone building um beside the road, but in the drawing there was smoke coming from from the chimney and a sign above the door and a wagon stopped out front and people going in and out. She looked at it for a long time. "What does the sign say? " she asked.
The writing in the drawing was beyond his current abilities and had been rendered as a series of squiggles that suggested letters without committing to any. Hartwell House, he said. I thought that's what you'd call it. She looked at him. He looked back with the expression of someone who has guessed correctly and is not going to pretend he didn't.
Hartwell House, she said. It sounds like a place people go on purpose, he said, not just because they're stopping. She folded the drawing carefully and put it in the box with her mother's recipe book. The stone building took the spring and summer to make right. Roy did the masonry oven, a proper baker's oven, deep and even heated, capable of holding eight large loaves at once.
Matteo organized the flagstone floor over two weekends in April with three of the ranch hands helping. And the result was not perfect. The flags were cut from the quarry deposit 2 mi east, and some of them were irregular, but it was solid and real, and it was hers. She painted the sign herself, Hartwell House, in letters large enough to read from a wagon on the road. She hung it on a Saturday morning in early June, with Gideon holding the ladder, and Jaime watching from below, with his arms crossed the way he crossed them when something mattered.
The first customers were two traveling merchants who came through on the road to Laramie a week after the scene went up. She sold them bread and smoked pork and two jars of preserves and a pot of hot coffee each, and they paid without being asked for a fair price and told her the bread was the best they'd had since leaving Missouri. She told them to stop on the way back. They did. By midsummer, there were regulars.