Then she sat it down and looked out the kitchen window at the stone building, visible through the bare trees beside the ranch road, its good chimney against the February sky. Jaime appeared in the kitchen door. He looked at the letter. He looked at her face. He did not ask.
She looked at him. "Do you know what a written contract is? " "No," he said. "It's a document that says what both parties agree to, what they'll do, what they'll get for it, signed by both of them. " She folded the letter. It means if one person breaks their word, the other person has proof. He thought about this like a handshake but on paper.
Exactly like that. He came into the kitchen and went to check on the starter which was his morning task even on days she hadn't asked him to do it. He fed it and stirred it and moved it to its proper spot and stood back. If you went to Cheyenne, he said to the starter rather than to her, could you take the starter with you? She looked at the croc part of it.
Yes. A starter lives as long as you feed it. You could keep the rest here and it would keep going. So there'd be two of them. That's how starters work, she said.
You give part of it away and it doesn't diminish what's left. Both parts keep living. He was quiet. Jaime, she said. He looked at her.
Whatever I decide, it's not going to be because I don't want to be here, she said. I want you to understand that his face did something complicated and then smoothed back out. He was learning to manage his expressions from his father, she thought, except he hadn't gotten fully proficient at it yet, which meant she could still see everything. Okay, he said. She made the lunch.
The afternoon, Gideon finally said the thing he'd been not saying for weeks arrived without announcement, the way most important things do in the middle of an ordinary task, with poor timing and no preparation on either side. She had been in the study going over the February accounts with him, a task she had taken on sometime in January without either of them formally deciding she should because because the household financial management and the food management were connected to separate cleanly. And Gideon's system for tracking expenditures was, to put it charitably, impressionistic. She had developed a better ledger. He had accepted this with the same matter-of-act practicality he'd accepted most of her organizational improvements as if she had identified a loose board and fixed it and the only reasonable response was to acknowledge the floor was more stable now.
She was cross-referencing the feed costs against the cattle count for the spring market calculation. He said without looking up from his own portion of the accounts the Cheyenne letter she kept writing. What about it? You haven't said what you're going to do. I haven't decided.