Not much, but enough. She left before winter, and the one before her, he was quiet for a beat. "Are you going to be asking a lot of questions? " "Just the ones that seem relevant," she said. He held her gaze for a moment, and she held his right back, which he seemed to neither expect nor know what to do with. "Your room's upstairs," he said finally.
"Second door on the left. Supper needs to be on the table by 6. " He reached for his hat, where it hung beside the door. The boys are in the front room. He was gone before she could answer. She heard the door close and then his boots on the steps outside and then nothing.
Rosalie stood in the entry of Blackthornne Ranch with her suitcase in her hand and the cold working through the walls and something in her chest that she couldn't quite name. Not quite despair, not quite hope. She went to the kitchen first. The pantry was worse than she'd thought from the entry. Not bare, but thin. worryingly thin for December on a working ranch that needed to feed 10 people through a Wyoming winter.
Half a sack of flour, three pounds of dried beans, some cornmeal, bacon ends, probably 4 lb, four jars of preserved tomatoes, two jars of apple preserves, old enough that the lids had gone concave, a salt block, dried onions, the cheap kind that had lost most of their smell. She stood in the pantry doorway and did the math in her head. The math did not come out well. She went to find the boys. Most of its windows were dark.
They were in the front room the way Gideon had said, but the word in did all the work because neither of them was doing much else. The older one, EMTT, she'd been told, 11 years old, was sitting near the window with a book held open in his hands. But he wasn't reading it. He was watching her. The younger one, Jaime, was 8 and sitting on the floor beside a cold fireplace, pushing a wooden block around the floorboards in a path that went nowhere in particular.
Rosalie had not spent a great deal of time around children. She liked them in the abstract way. People like things they're not sure how to use, but she had learned a long time ago that children, like adults, can usually tell the difference between someone looking at them and someone actually seeing them. She pulled a chair to the middle of the room and sat down without taking off her coat. EMTT, she said.
Jaime. EMTT's eyes moved to her, but his expression stayed right where it was. Jaime stopped moving the block. My name is Rosalie, she said. I'm going to be cooking your meals this winter.
I need to ask you some questions about the kitchen because I want supper to be something you'll actually eat and not just something I thought sounded good. EMTT blinked. What do you like? She asked. Silence.
She waited. Biscuits, Jaime said very quietly, not looking up. With gravy or without? What kind of gravy? Another pause.