He poured his coffee. He looked at it. It's too strong again. You always make it too strong. Then you should make it.
You always come down before I do. He looked at her over the cup. Something in his face was different in the morning light after 8 days of viol like the storm had worn some layer of him thin. I like that you fix it, he said. She took the pot and added the hot water from the basin she kept near the stove for exactly this reason.
The coffee went from mud to something you could actually drink. Emmett wants to go to Harker with you. She said he won't ask you directly. Gideon looked at the window. You think he should?
I think he's been useful this winter and he knows it and he needs you to know it, too. She set the pot back, but that's your call, not mine. He was quiet. This was not the quiet of dismissal. It was the quiet of a man sitting with something.
He told me, Gideon said, that you said he had more sense than most of the adult men you'd known. I said that while dragging you back from a frozen ravine. Context matters. The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile.
She had seen that happen twice before, and both times it had done something to the morning she hadn't been prepared for. She went to start the porridge. He took Emmett on the supply run. She watched them go from the kitchen window, the wagon moving down the track through the snow. Emmett sitting beside his father with his shoulders squared in the particular way of a boy who is working very hard not to look like he's trying to look like a man.
She watched until the wagon was out of sight, and then she went back to work because there was always work, and work was what she knew how to do. Jaime spent the morning in the kitchen with her, which had become so standard that she'd stopped judicing the absence of it when it didn't happen. He was measuring the starter that morning, a task she had given him full responsibility for, and he was doing it with the focused gravity of a small person who understood that the sourdough starter's continued health was a real matter with real consequences. It ate too much, he announced. She looked over.
The crock was high fuller than it should be at this point in the morning feed cycle. You can see by the surface level and the smell. He leaned close and sniffed. It smells too sharp, like when something's working too hard. She put her spoon down and came to look.