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.
She waited. My mother used to put something in them. Spice. I don't know what it was. Made them taste like he stopped.
I know it's not your job to cook what people want. What did it smell like? She asked. He thought about it. Like smoke and something sharp.
She turned to the spice shelf spare, but not empty. She had reorganized it 2 weeks ago. Cumin, she said, taking down the small tin and probably chili. Did she cook them long? All day, he said.
I can do that on Thursday when we have time for it. She set the tin on the counter. Anything else? He looked like a man who had prepared for a harder conversation. No, he said.
That's all. He left. She put the cumin back and thought about the particular economy of small gestures, how much they cost, how much they returned. Her mother had understood that a recipe book was not really a book of recipes. It was a record of every time a woman had used food to say something she didn't have the language for otherwise.
She thought about this more than she should have. Probably the storm broke on the eighth day. Not with fanfare, the wind simply went quiet sometime before dawn. And when Rosalie came downstairs, the kitchen windows showed a sky that was still dark but clear, stars visible for the first time in over a week. She stood at the window and looked at them for a moment with her arms crossed over her robe.
Feeling something ease in her chest that she hadn't realized had been clenched, she made the coffee. Gideon came down 10 minutes later. He looked at the clear window and then at her. Roads might be passable by tomorrow, he said. We need the flower first.