And Jaime, who had been watching from his usual spot at the edge of the kitchen, started helping without being asel holding things, stirring when she pointed at what needed. Stirring, keeping out of the way when she needed to move quickly. Is P coming back for lunch? He asked at one point. This is lunch, she said.
We're taking it to him. At noon, a young hand named Ellis appeared at the back door, snow covered and moving like someone whose feet had stopped feeling useful. She handed him the kettle, the biscuit box, the coffee. She had packed four times more than she'd calculated because she looked at Ellis's and understood that Ellis Ellis and what whatever she sent out there was not going to be too much. She also sent her largest ladle because men eating from a shared kettle in a snowfield needed something with a long handle.
Ellis looked at the volume of food she was handing him and said, "Ma'am, this is Thank you. Come back for the box when you're done," she said. and tell them to eat fast before it cools. He went back out into the white. She stood in the kitchen and felt the cold from the open door for a moment after it closed, and then Stits windows were dark, and then she went to the pantry and stood in front of the shelves with her inventory list, and did the arithmetic that she'd been doing in the back of her head all morning. They were going to need to ration.
Not m drastically, not yet. But the storm was telling her something she needed to hear. This winter was not going to be cooperative, and the supplies she had thought might carry them comfortably, comfortably to March, were going to need managing with more discipline than she'd planned. She went to the desk in the corner of the kitchen, where she kept her ledger, the one she'd started up the week she arrived, logging every item in the pantry, and every meal she produced, and she sat down and began making a new kind of list. not what they had, what they needed and when and in what order and what they could do without if they had to. It was the kind of problem she had a particular aptitude for, and she knew it, and there was something almost settling about being faced with a problem she was genuinely equipped to solve.
She was still at the desk 2 hours later when EMTT appeared at the kitchen door in his coat and boots. "I want to help," he said. She looked up. out there. He gestured toward the yard. With the cattle, you're 11.
Mateo started working cattle at 9. He held her gaze with a steadiness that was either maturity or stubbornness or some mixture she hadn't sorted out yet. I know how to handle a horse and snow. P taught me. Does your father know you're planning this?
He's not here to ask. That's a convenient fact, she said. He didn't move. She looked at him for a long moment. He looked back.
He was not going to beg and he was not going to leave. And she recognized the particular quality of that determination because she had felt it herself in doorways not unlike this one with people looking at her the way she was currently looking at him. Put on your second pair of socks, she said, and tell me which horse. Biscuit, she's steady in weather. Take the rest of the biscuits in the cloth and give them to whoever needs them most.