Her mother's handwriting, slanted and quick, a recipe for sourdough bread that took 3 days to do properly. She hadn't tried to make it since her mother died. She thought about the pantry about February. About the way Jaime had stood at that stove like the wooden spoon was something worth holding. She closed the book.
She went to bed. And in the morning she got up before first light and went down to the kitchen and started making a sourdough starter from the last of the flour. And the water left standing in the basin because if she didn't start it now, it wouldn't be ready before the flour ran out. She was not a woman who waited for things to get better. She was a woman who made them better.
It wasn't the same thing, and it never would be. The sourdough starter was alive by the fourth morning. Rosalie knew it before she even lifted the cloth. She draped over the croc. She could smell it from across the kitchen.
That particular sour yeast smell that meant the wild cultures had taken hold and something was working the way it was supposed to. She pulled the cloth back and looked at the surface at the bubbles rising slow and steady through the pale batter. And she felt something she hadn't felt in weeks. Not happiness exactly, closer to relief. The specific relief of knowing that at least one thing in her life was going in the right direction.
She fed it, covered it again, and started on breakfast. The rhythm of Blackthorn Ranch was not hard to read once you paid attention. Gideon was out of the house before dawn every morning, without exception, usually before Rosalie even came downstairs. The ranch hands ate in the bunk house mostly, though two of them a young Mexican man named Matteo Sirano, who served as Gideon's foreman, and an older hand named Roy, who walked with a permanent limp from some old injury he never explained, had taken to appearing at the kitchen door around breakfast time. She fed them.
Nobody had told her to. Nobody had told her not to. EMTT and Jaime's school had been closed since October because the school teacher had left Red Hollow for reasons. Nobody seemed willing to explain clearly, which meant both boys were at the ranch most days with varying amounts of energy and absolutely nowhere to direct it. EMTT managed this by disappearing.
He was good at it. She'd go an entire morning, sometimes without seeing him. Then he'd appear at the lunch table looking like he'd been somewhere specific, but wasn't going to say where. Jaime managed his unstructured days by orbiting Rosalie, appearing in the kitchen at odd intervals, and then vanishing again, a shy planet working out its own gravitational relationship to the nearest warm thing. She let him orbit.
She didn't push. By the end of her first week, she had established three things. The first was that the pantry situation was genuinely alarming, and Gideon needed to move on restocking supplies before the roads got any harder to travel. The second was that the boys had been eating badly for long enough that their idea of a normal meal had narrowed considerably, which explained why Jaime's entire face changed when she put fresh bread on the table for the first time. The third thing she had established, mostly for her own benefit, was a clear line she was not going to cross.
She was the cook. She was not their mother. She was not Gideon's companion. She was not the solution to whatever had gone wrong in this house 8 years ago when his wife died and left four walls and a cold fireplace in place of a family. She was here because she had nowhere else to go and she was going to do her job well and she was not going to let herself want anything beyond that.
She had made that mistake before wanting things. It didn't end well. She told herself this at least twice a day and mostly believed it. On the eighth morning, she raised the supply issue with Gideon directly. She had learned by then that catching him at meals was inefficient because he ate fast and left faster.
The more reliable approach was the barn early before he'd gotten fully into his day. She put on her coat and her heavy boots and walked across the frozen yard in the gray pre-dawn light and found him in the near barn checking on a a mare that had been running a slight fever. He looked up when she came in, not startled. She suspected Gideon Rusk was not a man who startled easily. "I need to talk about provisions," she said.
"I know. I wrote up a list. " She pulled the folded paper from her coat pocket and held it out. He took it. He read it in the light from the single single lantern hanging near the stall. His expression did not change, which she was beginning to understand was not indifference, but simply how his face operated.
"This is a lot," he said. It's what we need to get 10 people through to April without cutting portions. It's more than I budgeted. Then the budget needs adjusting, she said, or the portions do. I can make the second option work, but I want you to understand what that means.
By February, we'll be eating beans 6 days a week, and the men's energy for heavy ranch work drops accordingly. Your choice. He looked at her over the list. That flat evaluating look she'd already cataloged. How do you know what ranch hands need to eat to work?