You feed it flour and water and it grows. He stared at the croc. It eats in a manner of speaking. What happens if you forget to feed it? It dies.
He was quiet for a moment. Does it hurt it if you forget? She looked at him, 8 years old, standing in his socks with one of them still half off its foot, asking whether a bowl of fermenting flour could feel neglect. No, she said more gently than she'd said most things. It doesn't feel anything.
It just stops working. He nodded satisfied. Then can I feed it? You can help me. She showed him the measurements, how to stir it in, how to scrape down the sides of the croc so nothing dried out and hardened.
He did it carefully, the way you do something when you're aware it matters. The kitchen that afternoon was warm from the stove and dim from the heavy sky outside. And it occurred to Rosalie against her better judgment that this was the kind of afternoon she had not had in a long time, the kind that didn't ask anything from you except to be present in it. She shut that thought down before it went anywhere useful, and started on supper. EMTT appeared that evening during a gap in the snow, stomping cold into the house and heading straight for the kitchen instead of upstairs for the first time since she'd arrived.
He stopped short when he found her and Jaime both at the stove. He stood in the kitchen entry in his coat, snow in his dark hair, watching. "Wash your hands," Rosalie said without turning around. "And you can help Jaime set the table. " He didn't move for a moment. Then she heard his coat go on the hook and his boots on the floor and the sound of water at the basin.
She didn't comment on it. She just moved the bread pan aside so there was room on the counter for him to take the stack of plates. Supper that night was beef and bean stew because she'd traded two jars of her apple preserves with the older the ranch hand for three lbs of good beef. he'd come by through a complicated arrangement she didn't ask about the bones she'd already roasted and cracked into a broth. The broth, the beans, the beef, the dried onions, a pinch of the precious salt. It was not a sophisticated dish, but it was the kind of stew that did what food is supposed to do, which is make the place you're eating it feel safer than it did before you started.
Gideon came in from outside later than usual, his coat iced stiff and his face set in the particular way of a man who had been dealing with problems for too many consecutive hours. He stopped in the kitchen door the same way EMTTs had. This seemed to be a family trait, these pauses, this recalibration, and looked at the table set with all four plates and the steam rising from the pot on the stove and his two sons sitting in their chairs. "Sit down," she said. "It's hot," he sat.
She served. Nobody talked for a few minutes, just the sound of spoons and the wind working itself against the windows and the fire doing its job in the stove. Then Jaime said, "I helped with the starter today. " Gideon looked at him. "The what? The bread starter.
Rosal's got it in a croc. It's alive. It's yeast," Emmett said in the tone of an older brother who has already processed this information and is now above it. "It's bacteria and yeast," Rosalie said. EMTT's right that it's not alive the way you and I are alive, but it is a living culture.
Gideon looked at her. Something in the way he looked, it wasn't the evaluating look. Wasn't the flatness. She wasn't sure what it was, and she wasn't going to spend time trying to identify it. Where'd you learn to cook like this?
He asked. My mother, she said. She had a recipe book. She started it when she was younger than I am now and added to it her whole life. Is she still she died 2 years ago?
He nodded. didn't push. She appreciated that more than she would have said. The next morning, she found Matteo Serrano waiting at the kitchen door before breakfast. He had his hat in his hands, which was either politeness or or apology, and he looked like a man who had been working up to saying something for a few days. Miss Hartwell, he said, can I ask you something?
Ask some of the men are he paused, looking for the right word. Some of them heard what was said in town about you and Cheyenne. She turned from the stove and a couple of them are saying they're not comfortable eating food from someone who he stopped again. They're saying they can't be sure. She looked at him steadily.
Matteo Serrano was about 30 with the direct gaze and the careful manner of a man who had spent his life having to be twice as careful as the men around him and knew exactly what that cost. "What do you think? " she asked. He met her eyes. "I think the stew last night was the best meal I've had since I came to this ranch. and I've been here 3 years. Then eat it, she said.
The men who don't want to can make their own arrangements. He almost smiled. That's what I told them. He turned to go. Mateo, she said.
He looked back. How do you take your eggs? This time he did smile. However you make them. The two ranch hands who had been loudest about their discomfort were a pair named Coats and Briggs.