She did not call it anything. She was careful about that. What she could not be careful about was the ration system, which required her to be considerably more present in the workings of the ranch than she had been before the storm. The storm had been going 6 days when she finally sat down with Matteo and Roy and Gideon at the kitchen table with her ledger open and laid out what the next 8 weeks were going to look like. She had colorcoded it, not with ink.
She didn't have, but by drawing lines, solid lines for what they had, broken lines for what they'd need, dotted lines for the margin she was trying to maintain between adequate and desperate. She had calculated portions by weight, and by the caloric demands of outdoor labor in cold weather, which she knew from her mother's time cooking for a lumber camp, not from anything she'd advertised when she took this position. Gideon looked at the ledger the way he'd looked at it the night she came back from the ravine with the particular attention of a man who was recalibrating something. Roy looked at it and whistled low. You did this in a day?
Roy asked. Two days, she said while also cooking. Matteo studied the column for the ranch hands. The men are not going to love the breakfast reduction. I know.
She said the breakfast reduction is because they need more at midday when they're working and less in the morning when they haven't started yet. It's not a cut, it's a redistribution. The total calories stay the same. They'll still complain, Matteo said. They can complain to me, she said.
You tell them the distribution comes from the food manager and Gideon's backing it. That's all they need to know. Matteo looked at Gideon. Gideon looked at her. Food manager, he said.
That's what I am now, she said. Unless you want someone else doing this. A pause. Not long. No, he said.
She closed the ledger. Then we start tomorrow. The ranch hands took it better than Matteo had predicted and worse than Rosalie had hoped, which was about what she expected from a group of working men being told that the woman in the kitchen was now making decisions about what went on their plates. Coats grumbled. Two younger hands made jokes she was not supposed to hear.
Ellis, who had carried the soup out during the first bad day, told the others to settle down, which helped more than she would have given Ellis credit for two weeks earlier. The one who surprised her was a hand named Decker, broad and quiet, who had never said a word directly to her in the 5 weeks she'd been at Blackthornne. He appeared at the kitchen door on the third morning of the new system and stood there until she acknowledged him. Yes, she said. I wanted to ask, he said, about the beans.