Rosalie had not spent a great deal of time around children. She liked them in the abstract way. People like things they're not sure how to use, but she had learned a long time ago that children, like adults, can usually tell the difference between someone looking at them and someone actually seeing them. She pulled a chair to the middle of the room and sat down without taking off her coat. EMTT, she said.
Jaime. EMTT's eyes moved to her, but his expression stayed right where it was. Jaime stopped moving the block. My name is Rosalie, she said. I'm going to be cooking your meals this winter.
I need to ask you some questions about the kitchen because I want supper to be something you'll actually eat and not just something I thought sounded good. EMTT blinked. What do you like? She asked. Silence.
She waited. Biscuits, Jaime said very quietly, not looking up. With gravy or without? What kind of gravy? Another pause.
Mama used to make it with drippings. EMTT's expression shifted just briefly and Rosalie filed that away without commenting on it. Dripping gravy, she said. I can do that. EMTT, what about you?
You're not going to stay, EMTT said. His voice was flat and careful. The way you make your voice when you've rehearsed saying something hard. I haven't been here an hour yet, Rosalie said. Mrs.
Hennessy lasted 2 weeks. Mrs. Albbright lasted 5 days. He looked at her with those dark eyes that had too much in them for an 11-year-old. You might be a little longer, but you'll go.
They all go. Most of its windows were dark. Rosalie looked at him for a moment. She thought about telling him she was different, that she wasn't going anywhere, that he could trust her. She knew better.
Those were exactly the things you said when you were going to leave eventually. "Tell me something you're tired of eating," she said instead. He was quiet, then salt pork. That I can help with right now, she said, and stood up. Come show me where your father keeps the good pots.
He didn't come, but he watched her go toward the kitchen with the closest thing to curiosity he'd let himself show since she arrived. She took what was in that pantry, and she made something. Not a miracle. She was not a woman who believed in miracles, but something real. Beans soaked fast in hot water.
The bacon ends rendered down until they gave up their fat. Dried onions in that fat until they softened and the smell came back into them. The beans added back. Cornmeal patted into cakes and fried in the remaining fat. Two jars of the preserved tomatoes opened and added to the beans to stretch them.
The kitchen smelled like food. It sounded like a small thing. It was not a small thing. She heard footsteps on the stairs 20 minutes before she planned to put anything on the table. One set of footsteps, light ones.
Jaime appeared in the kitchen doorway in his socks, one of them half falling off his foot and stood there breathing in. She did not say anything. She handed him a wooden spoon and pointed at the bean pot. "Just keep it moving," she said. "Not too fast. " He took the spoon.
He stirred. He watched the pot like it was the most important thing he'd ever been asked to do. She set the table without asking anyone to help. Gideon came in from outside at 6 minutes 6, which she suspected was actually very close to on time for a man who spent his days managing cattle and ranch hands and problems that didn't keep to anyone's schedule. He stopped in the kitchen entry and looked at the table and then at Jaime standing at the stove with the wooden spoon.
Something moved in his face that he covered quickly. He hung his hat. He washed his hands at the basin. He sat down without a word. She put the cornmeal cakes on the table, the beans.
She went back for the pan bread she'd made with the last of the flour. EMTT came down on his own. He sat across from his father without looking at either of them. They ate in silence. She had not expected conversation.
She ate standing at the counter the way she'd always eaten in kitchens out of habit more than anything else. And she watched in the unobtrusive way she'd learned to watch, the way the two boys handled their food. Jaime ate everything on his plate. He mopped the bean liquid with the cornbread with the focused intensity of someone who'd been hungry before. EMTT ate more slowly, but he ate it all.
Gideon said nothing until he pushed his plate back. Then he looked across the table at the empty dishes and said without looking at her. That was better than I expected. The pantry needs restocking, she said. Significantly, I know.
Before the roads get bad, she said, "We need to go to town within the next 2 weeks or we're going to be stretching things by February. " He looked at her then, not annoyed, she noted. Something more like someone recalibrating. "I'll look into it," he said. He stood, put his hat back on, and went out toward the bunk house. She cleared the table.
Jaime brought his plate to the counter without being asked, which she suspected no one had taught him recently. EMTT disappeared upstairs. Later, when she'd cleaned the kitchen and banked the fire, and finally let herself sit down with her coat around her shoulders and her mother's recipe book open in her lap, Rosalie Hartwell looked around the dim, cold, quiet kitchen of Blackthornne Ranch, and thought about what she had, a job, a room, two boys who might eventually stop waiting for her to leave. A man who had said five sentences to her and meant all of them. She opened the recipe book to a page near the middle, one she knew by heart.