Yeah, he said. Like that? She gave him a bowl to taste. He tasted it. He set the bowl down and he looked at the middle distance for a moment in the way people look when a taste has taken them somewhere they didn't expect to go.
Good, she asked. My mother made these on Saturdays, he said. When I was about Jaime's age. She didn't say anything. She stirred the pot.
She died when I was 12. He said it's been a long time since I tasted something like that. Cumin and chili and patience, she said. Same beans anyone has. Just the spice and the time.
He nodded. He picked up the bowl and took it to the bench and ate it in silence, and she let him, because some things don't need narrating. The evening that changed things, not the big change, not yet. But another of the incremental ones that were accumulating in ways she was trying not to track, was a Saturday in the last week of January, about 5 weeks after she'd arrived. The wind had come back, but not the full storm, just the ordinary Wyoming winter wind that meant business without being a catastrophe.
The boys were at the kitchen table. EMTT was doing you doing doing sums from a book she had found his school primer on the second shelf of the study and started giving him problems from it because otherwise he was going to disappear all day doing things she couldn't account. For in his arithmetic was frankly inconsistent. Jaime was drawing something on the back of an old flower sack with a charcoal stick she'd given him from the stove. She was making the week's bread, her hands in the dough, working it the way her mother had taught her heel of the hand.
Fold, quarter turn, repeat until the dough talked back. Gideon came in from the study with a piece of paper and sat at the end of the table and started going over something with the look of a man doing arithmetic that was not going as well as EMTTs. The kitchen held the four of them and the smell of the bread and the sound of the wind and the fire and the charcoal on the flower sack. and it was so ordinary that it frightened her. She had not had ordinary in so long she had forgotten what it felt like from the inside. She worked the dough rosily, Jaime said.
H what does a bakery look like? She glanced at him. He was looking at her drawing on the flower sack she could see. Now it wasn't an abstract thing. It was a building rough and crooked the way 8-year-olds draw buildings, but a building with a big window in the front and something that might have been a sign.
Different sizes, she said. Some are just a room with an oven. Some are some are bigger with counters for display and tables for people to sit at. Could you have one? He asked.