He was right. The starter had been in a warmer spot in the kitchen since she'd moved it closer to the stove during the storm, and it was running faster than her schedule accounted for. "Move it to the shelf by the far wall," she said. "Cooler there. It'll slow down." He moved it carefully, both hands, treating the crock like something that needed steady handling.
"Jamie," she said. He looked at her. You have good instincts for this. He looked back at the crock on the far shelf. She couldn't see his face clearly.
Mama used to make bread, he said. She kept her voice even. I know, not the same kind. Hers was different. Most people's bread is different, she said.
That's how it should be. He was quiet for a moment. Do you think she'd mind that I'm learning from you? The question landed differently than she expected, and she took a second to answer it properly. I think she said that someone who made bread for her family would want her son to know how.
He seemed to consider this. Then he went back to the starter on the far shelf and stood looking at it with his hands in his pockets. She went back to the porridge. Gideon and Emmett came back from Harker in the late afternoon with the wagon loaded and Emmett talking more SEM than she had ever heard him talk, describing the road conditions and the state of the supply stock and something Harker had said about a cattleman in Casper that had apparently struck Emmett as significant. Gideon listened to him with the particular quality of attention a father gives a child when the child doesn't know they're being watched and the father is trying to memorize something.
She unloaded the wagon with Matteo while they were still coming up the track because the flour needed to be inside before the temperature dropped again at nightfall. Gideon appeared beside her when she was carrying the second flour sack. Let me, he said. I have it, Rosalie. She handed him the sack.
Not because she couldn't carry it. Because arguing about flour sacks in the cold with a man who had a bandaged head and cracked knuckles and had ridden a supply wagon all day seemed like the wrong use of everyone's time. He carried the sack inside. She followed with the canned goods. In the pantry, stacking the new provisions beside the carefully managed existing stores.
She felt for the first time since before the storm that the numbers were going to be all right. Not comfortable, not easy, but all right. Parker said something, Gideon said from behind her. She kept stacking. What did he say?